Jack Monroe off Twitter

[beammeuphottie]

The latest in the ongoing saga is that JM has left Twitter after being 'hounded off'. The incident that seemed to provoke this...someone critiquing a photo of her mums roast potatoes. It just gets more and more bizarre.

To be clear, I don't like to see public pile ons and some of the abuse directed at Jack has been unpleasant. But a lot has also been reasonable, polite requests for information regarding her patreon which have largely been totally ignored. And her supporters have to be some of the most cruel people on Twitter. It seems like it's fine for JM to voice her opinion but as soon as others do the same they are called out for bullying. And ironically subjected to vile comments from her followers. Go figure.

Am I the only one who thinks she's probably best having a little Twitter break? But eventually if she's ever to redeem her reputation she needs to show some transparency regarding public donations.

DMLady Please tell us some of the good things she's done?

We're all aware she's not all bad. No-one is.

Which is your prerogative.

But charities don't run for free.

Good thing - she campaigns against food poverty
Bad thing - she claims a family can live generously on a £20 a week food budget

Good thing - her recipes are free!
Meh thing - there are loads of recipes free online

Good thing - she's raised money for charity
Bad thing - she's not been transparent about where all of it goes or how much has been raised

Good thing - she sued Katie Hopkins!
Bad thing - she weaponizes that to shut critics up

Good thing - she's suing Lee Anderson!
Bad thing - is she really? She took donations from followers yet says she has a "pro bono" solicitor.

Poor thing - she's so bullied online
Hypocritical thing - she has initiated pile-ons on other sometimes apparently vulnerable accounts

No they don't run for free @00100001. The point is that TT is sitting on vast reserves and donating to grassroots local foodbanks is a much better use of people's income.

I agree with this. They have a huge amount of cash reserves. I would always choose to donate to my local food bank over TT.

It's funny because she was on James OBrien a while back and he was absolutely lauding her. It's interesting the very opposing views people hold.

Oh yeah, James OBrien is a proper Jack stan. She has a lot of them.

I agree. I think she has opened people’s eyes to the reality of cooking on a low income. She has publicised the concept of food banks to people who would have otherwise been unaware that they even existed. Equally other issues like food deserts.

But, she is clearly a liar. By her own words she is a liar. What Awful Molly did was very clever. She’s not used anyone’s words but Jack’s own. We can all get confused, and recall events in the wrong order, but very few of us would think that we had been a firefighter when we hadn’t, or reference having a degree we don’t have. She has taken money from people under false pretences. For me I think the bad outweighs the good.

Give it a couple more years and there will be a Netflix documentary.

She really is "Jack of all trades" isn't she? The only one she is master at though is scamming.

Been There, Done That, not only got the t-shirt but designed them too.

Shocking she has been allowed to get away with the grift and lies so long.

For me, that Grenfell article is beyond the pale.

The sooner she is outed for what she really is, the better.

I'm not sure that she's raised awareness of the realities of cooking on a low income? It's more like a desperate cosplay that if you're not replacing lightbulbs with garden solar lamps or melting down perfectly good soap bars, then you're not doing poor right.

She as an individual may not have shown the realities but I do think that she was a big noise at the start of the conversation.

She isn’t eating that stuff she’s cooking. The food is disgusting, with too few calories and they don’t work!
Lots of people like her because they like the idea of her doing cheap recipes but don’t eat that stuff themselves.

I don't think so. She did not start a conversation. That was already around.
She just sold it to certain type of people who like to pretend they care and are part of that suffering.

All she did was pretend people can survive on £20 midweek top up shop

I think your second point is so true - I definitely don't cook her stuff, even when I was a single mum before tax credits and surviving on very little I didn't eat rinsed hoops. Managed to make pasta and potatoes do a lot !

There have been cook books for cooking on a budget around since long before Jack Monroe was even born. Delia Smith did one. What Jack has done is to pretend that families can eat well on £20 a week. They can’t. Her recipes are badly costed and nutritionally inadequate. Pretending that people can eat well on that budget is damaging.

Only because middle class papers pushed her as the acceptable face of poverty and their readers lapped up the sob story. she in turn told those middle class readers that the poor can feed themselves on a pittance and that aligned with their already misguided belief that the poor just have big tellies and watch Jeremy Kyle.

All that really did was feed into the Tory mindset that the poor are all Scroungers that don't need food, light and heat... That they can eat perfectly well on nothing..
That's one reason the government believe an adult human being can survive on £334 a month to buy food, gas, electric, hygeine, clothing, pay council tax. Etc.

She, in part, caused that belief to spread and helped the government and media spread the scrounger narrative as opposed to helping the less fortunate narrative. People fell for it too.
Benefit Street, Benefits By The Sea and shows of that ilk all fed I to the narrative.

The poor are lazy work shy Scroungers that take people's tax money and get big houses and bigger TVs, that have kid after kid after kid to get more tax money. Anyone that's ever had any dealings with people in poverty and unemplyement can tell you, those people exist, but their a tiny tiny tiny minority, the government, the media that includes JMs articles and blogs etc all feed into the notion that the poor can be punished out of poverty because they're all like the people on Benefit Street.

She's done shit all to help, only made things much worse and much harder whilst she flogged £20 books to people that don't need to save money on their shopping, that buy them purely out of middle class guilt and sanctimony.

Completely agree. She is the acceptable face of poverty for the middle classes.

If anyone really wants to find out about her cooking on a budget recipes, do a Google search for the word slopalong. Pretty much all of her recipes are inedible and nothing like the photos, very small portions, nutritionally inadequate and in a few cases genuinely hazardous to health.

As a student in the early 80s I used The Pauper's Cookbook and Cooking in a Bedsitter, both published early to mid 70s.

Yup. Simply because she is actually not in poverty and never really been.

I couldn't take her seriously after the bit about having to remove lightbulbs because she couldn't afford the electricity bills. Believe me, if you can't afford your electricity bills you remember every single time not to turn the lights on - you don't need to remove the bloomin' bulbs.

Where is the slopalong please? Saw a thread on Tattle. Is that it?

And in the same article saying she hadn’t been able to afford shampoo for 2 years… while in the past 2 years showing pictures of her new hair styles courtesy of the Style Director at her local Toni and Guy.

That’s it. Some people are cooking as many of the recipes out of her books and blog as possible. Following her instructions to the letter, no substitutions or tweaks. The results are… interesting.