Jack Monroe (born 17 March 1988) is a British food writer, journalist and activist known for campaigning on poverty issues, particularly hunger relief.
She[a] initially rose to prominence when a post on her blog A Girl Called Jack (now renamed Cooking on a Bootstrap) went viral.
She left school at age 16, "bullied and disillusioned",[8] with insufficient GCSEs (she sat 7 and passed 4 and a half of them) to progress to A Level.
[14] Monroe came to prominence in July 2012 when the "Hunger Hurts" post on her blog A Girl Called Jack went viral on social media.
[15] The post detailed her experience of poverty, relying on benefits and struggling to feed herself and her child from a £10 weekly food budget.
[15] The blog was originally intended for posts about local politics, but evolved to offer cheap recipes suitable for people on a low budget.
[30] A seventh book Thrifty Kitchen of money-saving recipes and home hacks was announced in October 2022 for release in January 2023.
[33] Writing in The Guardian in 2013 Monroe said she had accepted the equivalent of the living wage for the six weeks that the campaign ran and donated the remainder of the fee to charities including a food bank.
The programme, made in response to issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, offered tips and guidance to families struggling with limited resources, and aired daily for a two-week period that commenced on 14 April 2020.
[48] In May 2017, Monroe participated in a "blind election date" with British television personality Georgia Toffolo in which they discussed politics.
[50] In November 2014, Monroe said on Twitter that then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron "uses stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric to legitimise selling our NHS to his friends".
[51] The Daily Mail journalist Sarah Vine criticised Monroe for using the death of Cameron's severely disabled son for political purposes and "choosing" a life of poverty.
Jenn Selby, writing in The Independent, described this as a "caustic attack", and Monroe replied on Twitter that Vine's column was "homophobic, transphobic, deadnaming [and] ignorant".
[53][needs update] In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she said: "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture.
[13] Writing for Pink News in September 2022, Lily Wakefield said that Monroe has "faced accusations of inventing experiences of living in poverty",[55] while in October 2022 Killian Fox said in The Guardian that "critics claim that she makes herself out to be poorer than she actually is".
[56][55] In January 2023, Kathleen Stock (writing for UnHerd) stated that Monroe was "wedded to a narrative of personal struggle and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, for better or worse" with an "inability to keep a story straight about whether she's really a downtrodden victim of a cruel system or rather #winningatlife", which had given rise to "an army of determined internet sleuths" and "a multi-headed hydra of critics on Twitter".
[13] Speaking in 2015 she said, "I legally changed my name by deed poll immediately after leaving Essex County Fire and Rescue Service at the end of 2011".
[65] The 2013 book deal resulted in housing benefit being frozen and Monroe came close to being evicted, which led to moving into cheaper accommodation.
[10][67] Writing in the New Statesman in 2015 she said she did not change her name to Jack while still working at the fire service, out of concern over "the potential for deadnaming and bullying in a not-particularly-tolerant organisation.
[64] In 2017, Monroe said she had developed acute arthritis, citing the condition as a partial cause for her suspending her campaign for candidacy in the National Health Action Party.
[13] In January 2019, Monroe wrote a piece in The Guardian that stated she was recovering from alcoholism and discussed how drinking had affected her work and personal life.