100 Quotes by Jack Monroe

I'm not the spring chicken everyone wants. I've got a debilitating illness. The brave face is 'I'm busy with work' but I've sort of chucked myself on the scrapheap. That's why I'm single. I've resigned myself to being a difficult woman.

I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.

Poverty took me from being the girl who was always the lead in the school play, to a woman who can't open her own front door.

Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education.

I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.

I write cheap recipes for struggling families and single people, and have donated 800 copies of my newest cookery book to food banks and other good causes.

I had no fake ID and looked 14 until my first grey hairs came in a couple of years ago.

At 11, following comprehensive psychiatric and cognitive assessments, an educational psychiatrist appointed by my high school recommended that I attend a school for 'gifted and talented' children.

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.