A biography for Jack Monroehasn’t been written yet.
“If you consider each individual tin as just the building block for a larger recipe, it doesn't really make much difference whether it comes from a tin, or whether it's fresh because it's just being used in a lot of other things.”
“When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can't be rented out as a dwelling.”
“Party politics are quite upsetting. I've been a member of the Labour party, the Green party, the Women's Equality Party, the National Health Action Party and now I'm not a member of any.”
“I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food.”
“I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.”
“All my politics and campaigning has been around issues that affect women: violence against women, welfare cuts to women.”
“I got over the whole British eating-with-hands phobia very quickly when I was working with Oxfam in Tanzania.”
“I had no fake ID and looked 14 until my first grey hairs came in a couple of years ago.”
“Even in my genre, cookery, just look who gets on the television. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater. All very nice men. All white middleflclass men.”
“I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.”
“In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.”
“I think as much as people moan at things like award ceremonies, it gives people role models. It provides real positive reinforcement that you can be who you are and still massively achieve.”
“I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can't really justify spending a fortune on food.”
“I eventually turned the fridge and freezer off - they were empty anyway - and the boiler, desperate to save money, shocking myself awake in the morning with the shortest, coldest showers, and boiling a kettle of water twice a week to bath my young son.”
“I think the thing about cooking from tins for me that I really enjoyed was... the convenience of it, the slight entertainment side of it. Just the surprise of being able to crack open a couple of tins, pour them into a pan, and 15 minutes later you've got a fantastic dinner on the table.”
“As a kid we would eat moussaka with mash. We had a real fusion of two cultures that no-one has dared to fuse since.”
“I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.”
“Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.”
“And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.”
“Benefit sanctions have been applied in cases where a person has failed to turn up to the jobcentre because they are in hospital following a heart attack. A woman was sanctioned for attending cancer treatment. A man was sanctioned for attending a funeral.”