Finally caught up! Many Frauen have already made the points that I wanted to make while I was reading, but fucking hell. What a wild ride.
1) Don't panic, this will pass. Jack seems to have a knack for going viral once a year, and always in Q1: in 2020, it led to the GENIUS that was Daily Morning Kitchen, and in 2021 we had that weird photo crying at Rishi Sunak that led to her appearing on the news and allegedly being cut off for calling Boris Johnson a narcissist. This is the latest version, and it will fizzle out soon.
2) That being said, this is particularly insidious. It's incredibly irresponsible to tell people, many of whom are already in a bad mental state, that they're going to starve to death. A week or so ago (a lifetime in thread terms), I linked to an old article of Jack's where she went into inappropriate detail about named individuals' suicides, describing their methods and claiming to know their reasons. This has the same gleeful air of appropriation about it. Jack would absolutely love it if some poor people starved to death. Think of the media opportunities she'd get!
3) The blue tickers who are fawning over her...sorry, but lol. I know a lot of you are big Nigella fans - I'm really, really not - but the idea that she has any clue about the realities of poverty is laughable. Ditto Hugh Grant. This has always been Jack's MO: she can tell absurd stories about poverty, because people with no experience of it will believe her. Then these stories scare people who actually live in poverty, because they start to think, "Oh god, if things don't improve I'll be nibbling stock cubes and selling my lightbulbs." Eventually, a lot of them come around, because they realise that nope, NOBODY nibbles stock cubes and sells their lightbulbs. But the lifelong rich continue to enable her.
4) The basic premise of her rant is flawed, and not just mathematically. First, as has been pointed out, she ignores cultural considerations. Just because someone is poor does not mean they want to eat the vile slurry that is tinned spaghetti, FFS! Take lamb: at the supermarket I use, it takes up very little shelf space. But there's a Moroccan butcher's shop in my neighbourhood which sells a lot more cuts at lower prices. Is that because the Moroccan immigrants are enjoying a jolly knees-up night after night? No, it's because they tend to cook with lamb a lot more than Catalans do. The UK is far, far more ethnically diverse, so this happens on a much wider scale. Then of course she ignores the fact that budget products have been rebranded in an effort to compete with Aldi and Lidl, because Harvest Moon and Crunchy Croc sound nicer than Value and Smart Price.
5) The Vimes analogy makes absolutely no sense in this context. It's also - and with all due respect to Terry Pratchett, who was a great author and an extremely impressive individual - just a more eloquent way of saying "buy cheap, buy twice." This does not apply to food. It does apply to other basic products (washing up liquid, for example), but Jack has never given a shit about those.
6) Speaking of which...I'll say it again: JACK WAS NEVER POOR. I forensically examined her output during the Poverty years a while back, and she was lying from day one - I think it's all on the wiki. In the early years she detailed the massive rent she willingly paid, the cats she adopted at the height of her poverty, the random businesses she kept starting, etc etc. Look at that Sunday People article. She keeps saying how during the Poverty she was so skinny from malnutrition, but...she wasn't? Like, the photo is right there, we have other photos from that time, she was a perfectly healthy weight, she was not starving, fuck off Jack.
7) Related to this - when I looked through Jack's old blog archive, it became clear that her first priced recipes were part of the Live Below the Line challenge, which she used to do every year. The thing is, when you look at her old challenges, you realise that she doesn't actually know how to shop on a microbudget. She's always buying things like stock cubes or mixed herbs or jars of lemon curd for 30p, out of a budget of 5£ for 5 days. If you have 5£ for 5 days, it makes NO sense to buy nutritionally void flavourings like mixed herbs or stock cubes; that 30p could buy you a tin of beans, which would provide protein for 2 meals.
8) In fact, here's an example of Vimes maths: there was one old blog I read where she recommended buying stock cubes instead of salt, which is utterly fucking insane. Salt is far more versatile, is used for baking bread. A bag of salt will last you a year, while a pack of 10 stock cubes will last you...10 meals. You'll spend far, far more on stock cubes than you would on salt if you take Jack's advice.
9) Here's a question: what could a budget-focused recipe writer actually do that's useful in the face of rising inflation? If I were Jack - and in this scenario we'll pretend that Jack actually knows something about food - I'd be pursuing a partnership with Aldi or Lidl. They have the most diverse special offers of any supermarkets (here at least, I assume it's the same in the UK), and they change every week. Wouldn't it be great to have a recipe writer with a deal to say "This week is Japanese Week at Lidl! Here are 5 simple, cheap dishes you can make with their discount products" or "Cabbage is in the Super 6 this week! Why not try one of my great cabbage recipes?" That would be a lot more useful than blindly flailing away at Twitter.
10) Finally: I for one am ecstatic that the last time she went THIS viral she had the kumquat, and this time she has Boris Johnson hair. Great look there, Jack!
but I do a lot of research approval in a uni setting and I'm really having a proper laugh at Jack's "working group". How's she vetting the qualifications of the people she's added, other than by just blindly believing their tweets? How is she going to account for researcher bias when they come across data that doesn't fit the prescribed narrative she's started with? This isn't a case of "this is my hypothesis, and I am researching to see if I'm correct", this is "I am right and I am going to show you".