Jack Monroe #244 Why has she turned this into supermarket sweep?

[NomDeGuerre]

Imagine being so self-involved that you'll actively seek out and like tweets calling you a 'hero' while simultaneously alleging your activism (/tweeting) is giving you PTSD. The narcissism is simply off the chart.

 

[People-huv-tae-know]

Fuxache

Brits will 'starve to death' as food and energy prices soar, campaigner warns

Poverty campaigner Jack Monroe says the cost of living crisis is worse than ever for vulnerable families across the UK - and warns people will die as a result of it

www.mirror.co.uk

That's right Jack, scare vulnerable and already stressed people shitless she is so fucking dangerous.

 

[BooBooPoohPooh]

Sudden realisation this morning that the sort of ink and paper used for receipts isn't stable. That shit fades, and any sort of moisture on the paper damages it too.

How likely are these 10+ years old receipts of one person's household which has fluctuated in size, location, wealth, changing culinary tastes and so many more variables going to yield any useful data?

The narcisism to believe that your shopping receipts hold any meaningful information.

 

[Rekyavikgirl]

I'm going to enjoy the fallout when her and Roadside Mum go head to head. Theyre at the polite compliments stage at the moment but RM just turned down a contribution from Jack for her book because Jack's not poor anymore. Sweetens the pill by praising her writing but the poverty purity game is ON.

 

[Dogmuck]

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!

I love every fucking word of this- beautifully put, beautifully delivered and I feel your frustration and rage running through but despite this you never once called her a cunt, so big hats off to you @colouredlines

 

[Rekyavikgirl]

I think the lowest donation tier of patreon, Kofi, and PayPal should be part of her new index.

 

[GladysMcHaggis]

Thank you to whoever posted the you tube video of the guy doing price comparison on basic foodstuffs. That was lightyears away from the kind of crap she comes up with. Proper comparisons, range of shops, good explanation of what he bought and why. And amazingly it seems that prices on the basics haven't gone up in the last year which was my gut feeling. I do my main shop at Tesco's and while I am super lucky in that I am not cash-strapped, like most people I do have to keep any eye on my food bills and find tescos pretty good on the whole.

I wish a supermarket would challenge her on some of this crap - I just don't see them reducing basics ranges - like everyone has said, they have been re- branded.

Another thing that gets my goat is the way people think she is some kind of cooking-on-a-budget maestro. She's so crap at this - there are SO many people out there doing it better and for longer than her. Meal plans, shopping lists, great family friendly recipes. Why oh why does she get a platform to spout this crap?

Sorry fraus, probably has all been said better before but I feel better now. Thank(space)you for all the fabulous jokes, gifs, collages - this place is the only good thing about being subjected to Jack's utter b*llocks

 

[Veronicaaa]

<deep breaths> I suppose it's good she's outing herself like this but it genuinely makes my heart race with sheer, unadulterated anger.

 

[BlendedSlop]

I'm still grunking and have also been BUSY adding to the wiki so sorry if this has already been discussed, but have I got this right - having volunteered herself to singlehandedly solve the rising cost of living and produce the #VimesBootsIndex, she's now assembling a "working group" who are essentially going to do the job for her? Is that the long and short of it?

Whaddawanker

 

[ednaturnblad]

Marcus Rashford is pure class. He’s so genuine and clearly focused on other people, not boosting his own profile. He actually amplifies other peoples voices, and doesn’t claim to be the maverick expert of all things poverty, cooking and *checks notes* economics. He’s not interested in shouting scare figures to get a front page. AND he does all this actual activism while having a job and other responsibilities. No humble bragging about not sleeping etc.

Sorry if it sounds like fawning but my respect for him is through the roof. It’s interesting how he is the opposite of Jack in every way and actually gets things done. Still waiting for the squigs to notice that the Twitter screeds aren’t really achieving anything.

 

[Veronicaaa]

No money in the bank but donating everything she earns to the Trussell Trust?

 

[TraceyJacks]

I keep coming back to the question of "what does this do, what will it achieve?"

I’d actually argue she’s achieved negative equity on these past 72 hours as she has: 1. happily taken space from actual charities that could have used the platform to reach more people in need 2. sorely missed the opportunity to spam the Trussel Trust details (for either donations or awareness) with every tweet (think she did it once now buried in her 100’s of other me-rails) 3. squandered the once in a lifetime rapid engagement of the blue ticks. As odious as the whole thing was she could have capitalised by doing something cheeky like “thanks for booster saucing H, if you agree it’s important fancy making a donation to TT?” y’know actually secured a substantial short term cash injection from people that have it to spare?

Its very revealing that her solutions “wagesandbenefits” has the onus on the victim to fix for themselves. “Claim benefits” (which most people won’t be eligible for regardless) I.e sort it yourself.

 

[Lumpyspaceprincess]

I have a savings account with £7 and an old bank account with £12 in it. Am I poor?
I also have access to several other accounts with more money than that. It’s meaningless.

if I was responsible for a child (and I am) and I only had £36 I would GO AND GET A FUCKING JOB!
But she’s lying, and he’s elsewhere….

did anyone else pick up on that little tale about him putting all those silly stickers up in the kitchen- is he ageing backwards?

 

[FlirtyThirty]

View attachment 1008373View attachment 1008377
New bio.

She’s not a food bank user!! She went once, her family got wind of it & were horrified and immediately started helping!! If she ever took food from a food bank she was literally taking it out of other peoples mouths when she didn’t have to because she’s a terrible person. This angers me more than anything else I think.

 

[Rekyavikgirl]

"The last line in my daily prayer is this: ‘Just for today I will be unafraid…And believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me’."

I didn't know there was a Grifters Prayer

 

[Orphan_Black]

literally my reaction to seeing the paper. What an utter, self serving prune she is. That smug smile with pumped up filler lips, the £80 hair cut, the shit makeup, and the scaremongering headline.

She is an absolute disgrace, and any media outlet promoting her shill need to go have a word with themselves. What happened to investigative journalism? Why are they printing her twaddle without fact checking a shred of it.

Jack, we know you read here, hi, seriously, you're scum.

 

[Into_the_tunnel]

It is horrid when something we care so deeply about affects us in other ways. It is obvious from our posts that the last few days have made us all want to keep on to make others see the light but it is also obvious that we feel dejected that this is happening all over again.

to whoever needs it. Muting helps. Leaving helps. Chocolate buttons (giant) sometimes help. Loudhailers at 5.30am definitely do not help .

 

[Rat]

This is so trivial and I'm sure incredibly out of place by now but like it really fucks me off how she talks about walking round the shops. With 2 heavy baskets and her calculator and her notepad and trying to remember all the prices of everything she has.

Get a trolley! Use scan as you shop! I flat out refuse to believe the tech we have in NI of baskets with wheels and putting cashiers out of work aren't in place in Thorpe Bay.

 

[ChocolateMuffin]

Sorry if this has been done and I've missed it. (I'm obviously doing 20hr days putting my draining board research together, at a granular level, getting other draining board and dish washing ergonomic experts together in my dedicated group chat, to explain I know more about this than them).
Sixty bastard quid on a squatty potty????????!!!!!!! WTAF

 

[Rekyavikgirl]

I miss the days of Why You Sob, Russell Hobb