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Fjara

New member
Hello 👋 been reading this thread for a couple of days and wanted to add some words as someone that is a food blogger. I was following the thread on mumsnet and 93% of people thought she was being shady with her donations but mumsnet still deleted it as a few were saying it wasn't #bekind. Give me a break!

I've been a full time food blogger for over 4 years. My site is way less popular and I'm virtually unknown with a fraction of the followers Jack has. However I still gross £4'000-5'000 a month. This is all in adverts from a network on my site and videos, not from doing #AD on social media. I say this not to show off but to say if you run a site with quality content it can be very lucrative. I use a few paid for tools and have web hosting, but they come to less than £100 a month. It's 100% bullshit that Jack says it's expensive to host her site, as it's not expensive and the money she makes from adverts on it makes far far more than the small hosting fees a month - mine costs £40ish a month (paid in USD) for 500k ish visitors and I'm nowhere near capacity with my webhost.

Jack Monroe infuriates me because she's making a very good living but still has her tips bowl and patreon to ask for more when she really doesn't need it.

Her site is terrible, it's not formatted correctly and her blogging is about 10 years out of date now. I wish I could just make a meal then take one or two photos afterwards and the job is done. But you can't these days you need to film a video, take step by step shots and take the final photos in various different setups, not just take two photos of the same thing from a different angle. Being a blogger isn't only about writing a post and that's it. I spend 80% of my time promoting and improving my content - making sure it appears in google, rewriting to improve it for SEO, creating videos for all the different social media sites and generally working hard to drive traffic to it. Then I'm researching what to make next. Jack doesn't do any of this as she doesn't need to because she's getting so much easy traffic from newspapers, her followers and other media outlets. She's a very lazy blogger.

Jacks recipes aren't anything new, most of them were the stuff I learnt in my home economics class in the 1980s. Using budget flour and budget chocolate to make a budget cookie isn't new or innovative.

I'm not jealous, I think she's a fraudster. With her 7 books and all her media work I bet she's earnt 500k if not a 1m and that's brill. But stop taking money from people that can't afford it. I have a limited company like she does and I could pay myself £8 an hour (although if spending all day on twitter and paying herself for that she's definitely overpaid) but it makes no difference as the bushiness account is in my name and only I control it.

As a single mum with two children, I chose this job with no security and have saved enough to live for a long time with no income because it's a job with no security so I built up savings! I find it incredulous that Jack went through poverty and then made a lot of money and had nothing saved up. BULLSHIT JACK. Was she ever actually poor? She chose to leave a secure job with a child and refused any help from the child's dad and her family all while pleading poverty and trying to get media attention?

Cooking and being poor are tools Jack uses for attention I believe as she wants a high profile media career.

Sorry for the long message tapped out badly on my iPad. I can't stand people like her that are liars and fleece others. Hope that wasn't a total bore fest.
 
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allybongo

Chatty Member
She’s vile. She doxxed me publicly on her IG account when I called her out on something a couple of years ago. At the time I stupidly had my real name vaguely linked to my Insta and she managed to pull a news article about me and posted about it with my full name and location.
 
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Satisfying Click

VIP Member
"Instead of wasting money buying a chicken and boiling down stock for hours, next time your dad is in the bath, just throw in some tinned carrots, onions and celery with a can of spagetti hoops, and leave to sit"
 
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Doobots

Chatty Member
I think my patience wore out when she wrote in the Guardian about how amazing a sober life was, having given up booze for a whole week. Stopping problem drinking, clearly, is a great thing to do and I hope she's kept it up and her life has improved from it. But to become the face of sobriety after one week was too much for me.
 
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DCICassieStuart

VIP Member
I've NEVER like her. I think she's just a massive attention seeker.

I'm Jack. Don't call me (birth name)
I'm a lesbian. No wait, I'm gender neutral. Call me Mx Monroe. No, changed my mind again. I'm a lesbian. Call me Ms.
I'm an alcoholic. I'm sober. I've fallen off the wagon again.
Etc etc etc

Now I understand falling off the wagon (have a relative who has been dry for 20+ years now, but admits that the temptation never leaves you) but I think she just loves a bit of drama. Any bit of drama.
 
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GrunkaLunka

VIP Member
Screenshot_20200403_103219.jpg Screenshot_20200403_103240.jpg

This is really upsetting me 😢 I wish I could ignore it but there is something in my soul that will not turn away from a person being so cruelly picked on. He hasn't even done anything, not that it would be okay if he had.
She is gloating and being fucking horrible about Jamie Oliver, still! Even though she's got her own show, she's still going for him.
It is disgusting. She has a lot of followers, 265k of them. And she's being a bitch about him, to 265k people.
What exactly is his crime? Why does she think he deserves this? I think she is disgustingly unprofessional and cannot believe that the BBC have employed her after this shitshow. I can only imagine that they are hoping this car crash TV will pull in the viewers, and that her horrible bitching will be free publicity.
I actually hope that this blows up in her face. I think she's a fucking horrible piece of work and she needs a good dose of #bekind.
 
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Fjara

New member
As someone in the business, please can you explain to me why recipe blogs are often so tedious? When I just want a bloody recipe but have to read the author's entire life history, the inspiration behind the recipe and the entirety of War and Peace before getting to the ingredients and method. I've started clicking off now and finding another recipe as soon as I see a sea of words.
Guilty here ✋ but it's a necessary evil. There are 2 main reasons:

1, It REALLY helps with google. If you have longer content you are likley to get higher in google so I am for 1000 words. Also the longer someone spends reading an article the higher up in google it goes as google sees the article as more useful. But you do have to balance it as if its too long people click back in seconds and it harms you in google. In my defense I do only write about the recipe and put up useful and interesting photos, you will never hear me going on about my dog, holiday in France or children or any total wordcrap that no one cares about! I try to make it useful and interesting for readers. I'm always going back and re-writing content or jigging things around to get the right balance. I've got a click to recipe button so people can skip all the blurb and go right to the recipe card.

2, So people scroll and get served a few adverts. My ad company tells you to aim for 8 adverts a mobile user. I know it sounds sketchy but I used to not do this and make a fraction of what I do and it is a full time job so I need to make at least a grand a month. Jack goes on about how she makes all her recipes for free, well we all do it's not special! You don't see recipes behind a paywall as its a struggle to get the traffic let alone charge for it. The longer content does get you more hits from google and more money, but I don't take the piss.

Doing blogging professionally does require a lot of work to research what will do well and how to get people to see it. Don't get me wrong I'm not comparing my job to a paramedic, but it's not a case of creating any old stuff and posting it. You have to really plan.

Vanity bloggers like Jack (and many others on social media) can just adapt any old recipe and post it up without much care and attention or work to promote it.

Thanks for the offers to share my blog that's really sweet, although I would prefer to be save with my anonymity. Covid-19 has really hit advertising rates on my blog - they are down significantly from last year and expected to keep falling lower. But that's fine, it happens and I've made a good living for the last few years for times like this so that my mortgage has been overpaid and I have savings so you won't hear me complain. I view every month I was able to make more money from a job I hated and be my own boss as a blessing. This kind of work by it's own nature is massively variable, you have to take the rough with the smooth. At any time google or pinterest could change their algorithm and half your income.
 
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maytoseptember

VIP Member
From what I can gather, she was purchasing the testosterone privately whilst awaiting her first appointment. I don't know whether she attended her appointment, will have time to research tomorrow.
Yes, I’m pretty sure she was buying it off the internet. She couldn’t have been taking it for long, because the effects of T on a female are massive and pretty irreversible - the facial and body hair, the deep voice, the structure of the face... So Jack dodged a bullet there.

There’s an increasing movement of young women who went trans for a few years - including having double mastectomies - deeply regret it and are back to living as women/lesbians. Also, the surgery to create a “penis” is so mutilating (one arm has to be stripped of some muscle) very few opt for that. It’s a very medicalised path and I don’t think it’s the path of acceptance and happiness that many hope it is.

Personally I think it’s terrible that young women, usually lesbians, are allowed to make such massive decisions when, actually, they would be better off with therapy to accept themselves and embrace gender non-conformity.

I’ll probably get flamed for this, because for some, nothing less than full support of trans issues is allowed. But I would be heartbroken beyond measure if my tomboy daughter ever grew up to feel like not being feminine meant she wasn’t truly female.
 
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OhhBacon

VIP Member
She can’t leave the house not have visitors because she is immunocompromised but she is annoyed that she didn’t get to present the cooking show that Jamie is doing?

How was she planning on presenting/filming the show if she can’t leave and no one can visit?

Channel 4/ BBC won’t show a programme to help the nation that is filmed on an iPhone!
 
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Spinidge

VIP Member
She's annoyed me for ages, it's a tie between her and Jameela Jamil to who is more woke and virtuous!! Today she posted about Tyson Fury and Traveller families facing discrimination and added that she was Irish! She certainly spreads herself thin being in each and every minority group you can possibly think of!
 
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Yel

Chatty Member
Moderator
I picked some wild garlic today and made pesto from some sunflower seeds. Far cheaper than the rank old salad bag pond water pesto jack is strangely proud of.

I therefore created wild garlic and sunflower seed pesto and anyone else that ever uses wild garlic or sunflower seeds for pesto stole it from me 🤪 and foraging for that matter 😆

Imagine if a man with a large following went after a woman, called her "that woman" and encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to target her. I'm sure it would be seen as unacceptable, but jack gets away with it.
 
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Satisfying Click

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I thought about drawing a Venn diagram of Jack, Sali Hughes and Jameela Jamil in terms of expertise, snippiness, histrionics, but realised it's a single circle.
 
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Catwinky

Chatty Member
What's she going to complain about now she has a show? And how will she fit the show into her 4 spare hours of the day?
1. She has to commute to London
2. The commute gives her anxiety due her being 'immunocompromised'
3. She's struggling to pay for her train fares
4. Jamie makes more money than her
5. Other cooking shows get more views than hers and its not fair as she is the 'store cupboard pioneer'.
6. Due to commuting she is struggling to make time at home for anything.
7. Other cooking shows are stealing her ideas. She invented the jackfruit and chickpea, aren't you aware??
8. Jamie is more popular than her
9. She's physically and mentally exhausted. She cares for a son, commutes, runs a house and writes recipes.
10. Please donate to paypal she's skint on the breadline.

The list could go on.
 
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Viewer1901

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It's 20 hours a DAY!! Don't you know Jack works harder and longer than anyone else ever?
Still 20 hours a day, at the famous £8 an hour she pays herself so £160 a day. Let's say she does this 5 days a week - that £800 a week, £3,200 a month before tax. Not including any paid appearances. And this bitch wants me to PayPal her some money? Get fucked. I didn't realise how much I didn't like her until I did that maths.
 
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maytoseptember

VIP Member
also going back to her 'skint' days, surely you wouldn't let your child go hungry just because of 'pride' when you've got your greek parents up the road who would definitely help you out
This is why I think she’s a fantasist. I daresay there’s always a grain of truth in there somewhere, but I don’t believe most of what she claims. She wrote about the heartbreak of having to tell her little boy he couldn’t have any more breakfast one morning. This was the blog post that made her famous.


Plus a Guardian write up:


Imagine your child going hungry because you won’t ask your parents down the road for help? Or her son’s father, who has always been around and she has a good relationship with? It doesn’t add up. Who would honestly be so embarrassed to ask family for help, you’d rather raise your son in a dark and freezing flat with virtually no food?

I’d love to know the other side of the story in 2012. Why did neither her parents nor her ex-partner intervene? She sent her son to his dad’s one Christmas because she couldn’t bear the idea of him spending the day in a freezing flat with no presents or tree. The man knew this and did nothing? Happily sent him back to Mummy on Boxing Day to resume his misery?

It just seems so unlikely doesn’t it?
 
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