In an era of celebrity chefs, the name Jack Monroe may not be the first that springs to mind, but make no mistake - Jack Monroe is a superhero crusader.

The political activist’s Twitter rant convinced supermarket giant Asda to reintroduce its ‘Smart Price’ food range into every one of its 500-plus supermarkets in 2022 to fight poverty. Her campaign also helped change the way Britain calculates inflation to take into account the poorest members of society.

Jack’s social media campaign did more in one week for Britain’s most vulnerable than most politicians do in a lifetime. So who exactly is the feisty blogger and Twitter revolutionary behind the bestselling Cooking on a Bootstrap? 

From Melissa to Jack

Melissa - aka Jack - was born in 1988 to David Hadjicostas, an ex-paratrooper and firefighter, and his wife Evelyn in Southend-on-Sea, a tourist town in southeast England. The family welcomed about 25 foster children into their home - sometimes on short notice - and considered this to be an essential public service. 

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Monroe was bullied at school and quit by the time she was 16. She was disillusioned and unemployed. Jack left home and drifted from working in a fish and chip shop to a job as a call handler for firefighters. By 23, she was a single parent struggling to juggle childcare and a job, however, so Monroe resorted to benefits - a painful slide from stability into poverty and hardship.

She used food banks for about six months.”When it’s all that you’ve got - or a large part of what you’ve got - it is a lifeline.” 

When her son John was still a toddler, Jack was at her lowest ebb: “There’s nothing nostalgic about missing days of meals, or turning off the fridge because it’s empty anyway - of dragging your toddler through the pouring rain to every pub and every shop in walking distance and asking them if they have any jobs available.”

By the end of 2011, she’d legally changed her name to Jack Monroe - short for ‘Jack of all trades’ - and sold her watch, iPhone, and TV to buy food. With no prospects in sight, Jack wrote a column, Hunger Hurts, for her blog that detailed how miserable life was as a single mother struggling to feed a child while on benefits.

"Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one Weetabix and says: 'More, Mummy, bread and jam please, Mummy,' as you're wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first, and how to tell him that there is no bread or jam," she wrote.

Within 48 hours, Jack had 2,421 emails from people who shared their stories. She was enraged on their behalf and her future as an anti-poverty campaigner became clear. Britain was failing its most vulnerable.

A Girl Called Jack

Monroe used her blog, then named A Girl Called Jack, to document her financial woes and shared cheap recipes to help families provide meals for less than £10 a week. In December 2015, she renamed the blog Cooking on a Bootstrap.‍

She had 16,000 followers when the blog caught the eye of Daily Telegraph food writer Xanthe Clay. She invited the journalist to lunch and cooked a 24-cent per portion chickpea tagine - a dish that would change Monroe’s life forever. Within a year, Monroe was writing for The Guardian. She fronted a Sainsbury’s ad campaign and appeared on a BBC panel which catapulted her into the status of poster girl for austerity Britain.

Jack recognizes that people are sick about hearing the word ‘austerity’, she said, but: “What about when those belts are tightened around the necks of the most desperate who hang themselves in the rafters because their benefits have been cut? Because that was a friend of mine.” 

Coming out

As her celebrity status rose, Jack Monroe was going through another transformation. In 2015, Monroe came out as non-binary and began going by she/her and they/them pronouns, stressing that she did not want to be referred to as 'he'. Talking about identifying as the gender group who feel neither male or female, she clarified, “I want to be treated as a person, not as a woman or a man.”

In response to her critics at the Daily Mail, Monroe wrote: “Transitioning isn’t a setback, it’s a freedom.”

Coming out to her son, John, was much less tumultuous. “My son knows that mom is like a girl sometimes and like a boy sometimes,” Monroe explained in an interview with Huffington Post.

‍Before announcing on Twitter that she was transgender, Monroe had already told close friends and family: “It took me five or six years before I could come up with an answer to who I was with a degree of confidence,” she said. “I was very cautious as to who I confided in, I didn’t want to be swayed.”

A voice for the disadvantaged

Ten years after living on benefits with her son, Monroe works closely with charities like Oxfam, the Trussell Trust, Child Poverty Action Group, Plan Zheroes and the Food Chain.

She also works with schools and children’s centers to teach people on low incomes how to cook and eat well. She campaigns against the causes of poverty and austerity in Britain and beyond; and Jack uses her platform to give the underprivileged a voice.

A true superhero

In early 2022, Monroe sparked a media storm about the shrinking value range and big price rises on the cheapest food products in supermarkets across the UK. In a Twitter thread, she detailed a number of products that had increased in price since the beginning of 2021.

Closing the Twitter thread, Monroe concluded: "The system by which we measure the impact of inflation is fundamentally flawed - it completely ignores the reality and the REAL price rises for people on minimum wages, zero-hour contracts, food bank clients, and millions more. We’re either all in this together, or we aren’t. (Spoiler: we aren’t)"

Thousands of her supporters re-Tweeted her posts. The groundswell of support convinced British supermarket giant Asda to put its value range of food back on the shelves.

As David vs Goliath victories go, it was a huge moment, but Jack is still not finished fighting for the underdog. Jack’s mentor and great friend was Hetty Bower, a British suffragette who devoted her life to political campaigning right up until her death in 2013 at 108 years old.

“She was still campaigning beside me at 108 at the Labour Party conference,” Jack recalled.“Hetty marched against austerity. She marched against the war. She marched, and she marched, and she marched in her yellow Macintosh against injustice, and unfairness, and inhumanity.”

Jack Monroe plans to carry on marching too until the impoverished have a voice, and until she inspires others to march beside her to end hunger and food poverty. 
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“At the moment, we’re just silenced, aren’t we? We are silenced by the worry that if we speak our minds, someone might unfriend us on Facebook… We are silenced by fear of being seen to speak up for what’s right. Who wants to be a hand-wringing liberal leftie these days?”

Jack Monroe believes one person alone may not be able to change the world, but one person can change the community around them.

“If Hetty Bower can go out marching at 108 years old, imagine what we can do.”