I’ve never been that much of a fan of the cookery book writer and media personality Jack Monroe. I find her writings, what little I’ve seen of them, tedious and uninformative and they don’t tell me more than I already know about budget cookery and her handy household tips are either more costly than the alternative or downright stupid.

What Jack Monroe writes is not stuff that could be useful for people on low incomes but poverty porn for the affluent middle and upper middle classes. Why on earth would for example as per one of Monroe’s ‘tips’ I take a mallet and a knife to a tin rather than buying a tin opener for 50p or even less if you go for a second hand one? From what I’ve seen Monroe puts out books that feed off of a fantasy of what the middle classes believe that low income people need to know. It’s patronising and cringeworthy.

Brendan O’Neill writing in Spiked Magazine really hits the nail on the head regarding what Monroe’s writing reminds him of and it’s something that I can recognise as well.

Mr O’Neill said:

That is the entire, no doubt unintended, tone of Monroe’s books: hey, dummies, here’s how to save money! It’s painfully patronising. As if working-class families haven’t been creating ingenious ways to get by on a tight budget for decades. As if hard-up mums aren’t already experts at making money last and ensuring their kids are fed. If a grammar-educated Guardianista like Jack had rocked up to my mum’s house – six kids, not much money – to ask if she had ever considered using her leftovers to make Mexican chocolate chili and black-bean soup, the results would have been hilarious (for us, not Jack). It all brings to mind the do-gooding ‘society dames’ Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier – upper-middle-class liberal women who took it upon themselves to ‘teach the unemployed more about food values’ and ‘give shopping lessons to the wives of the unemployed’. No amount of tattoos can disguise that Monroe is a modern-day society dame, dishing out thrift tips to people who’d apparently be stumped without her.

Mr O’Neill is correct here in his assessment. Jack Monroe is the modern version of the ‘society dame’, bringing their pointless and patronising do gooding to where it neither wanted nor needed.

Postscript.

If anyone out there is in the mood for extra laughs then why not go and have a look at the ‘Grifty Kitchen’ thread on Twitter where Ms Monroe is being steadily mocked.