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You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)
- brettangel698 3y agoGrades are Important measure of achievement and development in the academic realm. Still, not all students find it simple to keep up consistently good grades. This is where Technocrat Recovery, a well-known resource that focuses on enhancing academic achievement and assisting students in realizing their full potential, comes into play. Technocrat Recovery's track record in academic support services is unmatched. Their knowledge has helped countless students, who have also seen notable gains in their grades. Technocrat Recovery has a proven track record of achievement and a dedication to excellence, making it a trustworthy and credible option for students in need of academic support. Grades are more than just letters on a report card; they serve as indicators of a student's progress and understanding of the material. Good grades reflect a student's dedication, effort, and ability to grasp and apply knowledge. They provide a measure of academic achievement and can open doors to various opportunities in the future. Technocrat Recovery takes a holistic approach to academic improvement, considering various factors that can impact a student's performance. They focus not only on subject-specific knowledge but also on developing essential skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, and effective communication. This comprehensive approach ensures that students are equipped with the necessary tools to excel academically in the long run. You can always rely on Technocrat Recovery Email: technocratrecovery@contractor.net WhatsApp: +1-573-356-3708 Official Website: (www.technocraterecovery.site)
- markx2 3y ago"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."
- avereveard 3y ago[flagged]
- lucideer 3y agothis idea that life decisions like choosing to have kids are always made solely by individuals in a vacuum without any societal nor contextual influence is just such a perfect example of the privilege the gp is describing
- 2devnull 3y agoNobody really makes any choices if you think about people biologically. I like to think people have some freedom and therefore some responsibility. Not too much. But some.
- lucideer 3y agoExactly. Nuance. Every person bears responsibility for every decision they partake in, just as we also need to acknowledge that some have significantly more agency in such engagements than others.
- gosub100 3y ago[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoParents sure, but you had nothing to do with your parents bringing you here. Maybe your parents left you a few millions in a trust or even a billions worth family business... or your parents left you outside, in the streets, without school, making you beg others for food to survive. You had literally zero choice of what family you're getting born into.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pimlottc 3y agoWhat the heck is going on with this page, it gets struck in some kind of high speed reload loop on my phone (iOS Safari)
- markx2 3y agoBlame WordPress / Jetpack. I am a follower of her site for years, have all her books. What crashed her site I have no idea but it has never been the same since. It's a shame that Automattic - who created Jetpack - never reached out to help her restore the site. They have no obligation of course, but given her profile, given the massive good that she does, it would have been decent of them to do that.
- josefresco 3y agoWordPress person here: How is Jetpack at fault here? I deal with "redirect loops" on WordPress websites on a regular basis, and I've never found Jetpack to cause the issue - do you have insight here? FWIW I see no redirect loop on mobile (iOS/Safari)
- markx2 3y agoEx-Automattic person here. How is it at fault? I have no idea. But hey, it's a WP site, with Jetpack and I'm sure with Automattic's 'shadow site' ability they can diagnose it. They - Automattic - as I have said could do the decent thing and help Jack Monroe to restore her site to being functional.
- RugnirViking 3y agoGood heavens, this is some writing. Deeply relatable as someone who has also lived in not so nice circumstances in the UK for much of my life. I like to think i'm on the way to escaping it but we'll see.
- corobo 3y agoAye, likewise. So damn relatable. Especially the pics of rice with various vegetables. I'll always have a bag of rice and a bag of frozen veg just in case, even if I become a billionaire somehow. Survived for literal years on that combo, lol.
- rambojohnson 3y ago[flagged]
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoThis is a great article. How it ended up on HN I don't know, but can somebody please start submitting more like this, and fewer techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail?
- plutokras 3y agoIm sure there is a subbreddit for things like this. Im here for the tech stuff.
- Cacti 3y ago[flagged]
- latentcall 3y agoAgree, found this really moving and thought provoking.
- lostmsu 3y agoThe only thing you should be moving is her furniture. The only thought it provokes from me is disgust for a person who's stupid decisions end up on my own shoulders and shoulders of my kids. What she does is endemic in US and nothing good will come from promoting this.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI agree this was a great article. The "techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail" was annoying, unnecessary snark, that also is basically not true. I have rarely, if ever, seen uninteresting "JS technobabble" bubble to the top of the front page.
- milesvp 3y agoI see you’ve been on hacker news for about as long as I have. Used to be content like this would pop up more often on weekends for some reason. I too appreciate anything this thought provoking.
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- bowsamic 3y agoI can't read this, it makes me too sad for what my country has become.
- bell-cot 3y agoYes...but you might also want to avoid most works by Charles Dickens, or ...
- Fauntleroy 3y agoThis kind of suffering has been around far, far longer than recent history.
- easytiger 3y agoIt's a work of fiction. Care to elaborate on your issues?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
- cratermoon 3y agoFor background: https://library.samford.edu/special/treasures/2005/mite.html https://library.samford.edu/special/treasures/2005/mite.html
- bbsimonbb 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_the_widow%27s_mite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_of_the_widow%27s_mite
- hasty_pudding 3y agoI find it to be a beautiful turn of phrase
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoPart of this frustrates me, gives me ill thoughts, about the many various dysfunctions. But I think it kind of won me over anyways, gave me some connection to long hard trauma that starts to explain trauma response. Amid a system with collapsed safety nets. But speaking of connection, the humble beginnings story, of how she wrote her way towards something somewhat better makes me somewhat swell with pride, that people have these devices & are connected & can speak as we do: > I wrote the majority of A Girl Called Jack by email on a Nokia E72. I still have it in my desk drawer, and every now and then I just stare at it, and its tiny awful buttons, and wonder how the f*ck I did it. Because I had no other choice but to. It was my one chance at escape, my yellow brick road, my shiny red slippers, and I took it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hasty_pudding 3y agoOne if the worst parts of poverty is that it steals all of your time! All your time is devoted to just surviving, so you can never really better you situation. You want to improve your situation? Not happening, you gotta work 60 hours this week so you cant study for that AWS cert or medical coding cert. Then the job you work is most likely dead end with no advancement or fake advancement. So you live pay check to paycheck with no hope of escape. Then if you dont have parents or luck... to help one catastrophe and youre doomed. And luck is not a strategy. You literally are trapped by capitalism. Then even if youre able to scrape together some time every week to better yourself... so many artificial walls have been erected to prevent smart hardworking people from entering professions. That includes jacking prices on universities and industries requiring university education for licenses instead of a test/apprenticeship. Things you used to be able to do without formal schooling: law, cpa, PE, teaching, hair dressing, and more. Basically massive friction has been added to smart hard working people trying to skill up instead of supporting people skilling up to their potential. Tech is one of the few actually meritocratic middle class industries left but is now getting watered down by the entire world entering the industry. As a side note, think of all the wasted potential that could be bettering the human race who are trapped in the cycle of poverty. There could be a Mozart out there whose parents can't afford a fucking keyboard.
- corobo 3y agoAmen to stealing time, especially if you get yourself into debt. The amount of hours I've spent on calls with the bank or filling out their damn budgets when I could have been spending the time working and earning.. I'd have probably been able to pay them off lol Never mind all the paperwork and appointments and journaling you have to do if you need to claim benefits. Luckily I managed to get freelancing off the ground in the 6 or so weeks I was waiting to see if they'd give me food money. One day I'll earn enough to get to £0, then imma start helping everyone else in this situation. Being poor fucking sucks.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoI don't know how you got into debt but a lot of people do it to survive. lol Student loan debt is massive simply people trying to better their skills to participate in the economy. Housing is massive debt people trying to get shelter. Just some types of debt. And big banks are at the top just profiting off of every single person trying to function in society. lol We used to be able to pay for university with a summer job. Used to be able to pay a house off in under a decade. Modern society has kind of turned humans into cattle to pay bank interest rates.
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agoHumm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality because no money for public transport.... Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up. Something isn't clear in this writer's account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that "poverty is largely accidental", especially coming from someone quite so articulate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thuuuomas 3y ago“This account of misery likely conceals the reasons that the author, in my estimation, would deserve their suffering.”
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y agodeserve? No one deserves suffering... your comment is in bad faith, no point discussing this any further with you...
- goatsi 3y agoIt's pretty clear if you read the article, and even more explicit in the news paper articles in her photos. She was a single mother with zero family support. She couldn't just work odd or long hours (and was forced to leave her existing better paid job) because there was nobody to care for her young child.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago[flagged]
- Fauntleroy 3y agoIf you read the rest of the article you'll see that she ate rice very very often.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- UncleMeat 3y agoIf you read the article, she eats a lot of rice.
- philk10 3y agoAuthor is a she and also has pics of rice on the page "Another variation on rice with mixed frozen veg, 2013. That measly bowl was lunch and dinner."
- roughly 3y agoShe. If you’d like to go back and read the rest of the article, too, I think there’s some gems you missed in there.
- troupo 3y ago> normally rice will give you most bang for your buck and fat rich dairy & oil products. At the end of the article she has photos from different years. After a few rice meals with frozen vegetables, one of the captions says "Here we go again! My god there’s a reason I barely eat rice any more."
- IlliOnato 3y agoNot only calories count. The body needs some amount these calories to come in the form of carbohydrates. Atkins aside, most people cannot live on fats and protein only.
- galdosdi 3y agoWell, actually, 1) She brought up potatos merely because someone else brought up an argument about potatos. She ate many other things. RTFA. 2) Calories aren't everything. Nutrients matter. Potatos are actually cheaper than rice when you account for all the nutrition. So it would make sense to make potatos a significant part of your diet, while still also mixing in plenty of rice (and, crucially, beans). If you actually ate nothing but rice you would become nutrient deficient and become sick.
- _mh56 3y agoThis keeps happening to me. I read a feelgood story, visit the wiki page and then realize how muddy the water is: >> Monroe has been described as an "austerity celebrity". In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture." Granted most poor people do stupid stuff after getting monies, but the charm of the tale is diminished. Edit: I meant touching not feelgood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe
- drcongo 3y agoIf you've never come across Jack before, most people I know in poor communities think she's a hero regardless, and quite a few would just say "Good on her" for the spending. She is a hero.
- titanomachy 3y agoYou consider this a “feelgood story”??
- steve_adams_86 3y agoIn the end she describes herself as being a rotten husk of a human being, clawing at the floor and sobbing at the drop of a pin. Sure she’s not economically impoverished anymore, but she’s certainly mentally and spiritually impoverished. I don’t feel so good. This felt too real and too close to home. I loved reading it in a sense—it’s well written and interesting—yet it also made me feel kind of sick. I have no idea how someone gets feel good story out of this.
- flipgimble 3y agoI think the story highlights a problem irrespective of the messenger. Some people cannot help but judge and opine on other's behavior where they have no context, or any moral basis to render that judement. We do this all the time in private, but politicians, or public figures, use the same propensity to pass devastating and life hampering policies, or inflame public opinion against a group of people. All I'm really hoping for is a wide spread culture of more humility and compassion in how we communicate in public, despite the exact opposite tendencies capturing the current herd mentality.
- thiago_fm 3y agoThat's one big paradox. Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools. Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times. Yet, my new social circle believe that I'm talented because of my DNA and efforts, and blame others for their poverty. But I know that those people making "poor" decisions in the view of riches are actually just trying to survive. With themselves, with the baggage they carry, and to the fact that they weren't as lucky as me. Talent, intelligence is literally everywhere. People that are awesome and ambitious is abundant. Nobody is really much better than others, but America post-ww2 managed to sell this idea to everyone, including many really smart and talented folks, that think they are gifted. To sum up, nobody chooses to be poor and humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone... Than believing almost trillionaries will guide us to where we need it.
- jack2312 3y agoTo anyone interested in how poverty (and scarcity in general) affects our mental state, and thus our ability to function well and improve our lives, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I've found it quite illuminating and interesting. It's written from an academic perspective, so it has plenty of research behind it, and the narrative flow is not bad. If you want something more concise and to the point, the article "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine provides a pretty good summary of the book. The themes from the book complement those in the article fairly well. [0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarcity https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...
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- jacquesm 3y ago
- jonatron 3y agoA recent UK Channel 4 TV programme talked about the recent decline in quality of food too. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-truth-about-food-prices-dispatches https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-truth-about-food-pri... (down right now) It included a section about modified starches being used to save ingredient cost, as well as the more obvious reduction in meat content. https://twitter.com/hwallop/status/1734687477347254678 https://twitter.com/hwallop/status/1734687477347254678
- titanomachy 3y ago“Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum.” This seems spoken as a cry of desperation, but outside of the anglosphere it would be quite normal. If I were living as desperately as this person seems to be, and with a child to take care of, my (elderly, immigrant) parents would be begging me to come home so they could help me get back on my feet. Not because they are wealthy, but because in most of the world family is the most important thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cptSparrow 3y ago[flagged]
- hasty_pudding 3y agoHer brothers escape from poverty is to literally face death on the battlefield. Not sure thats a better option.
- cptSparrow 3y agoHe could be a mechanic. It’s really the decision to estrange her next of kin that I find ridiculous. Pretty sad that this got flagged. I guess saying women like her are destroying western society comes off as sexist? But they are the responsible party, at least primarily, for the rise in single parent families. Idek.
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
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- screye 3y agoIncredible writing. Reading this, I kept feeling a sense that something was missing. It wasn't until later in the blog that I hit me. "Where is her community?" To a 3rd world immigrant, the idea of being this isolated in your the country you were born in, feels unfathomable. Back home, It's common for kids to live with their parents until the kids are ready, often until age 25-30. Alternatively, people will stuff themselves like sardines in a large house, to save money; but even more importantly, to find an accidental community among your fellow poor. Among poor people, a rotating-rep would buy in bulk for the whole community and then distribute among themselves. Saving money and time. The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog. Jack really did suffer alone. As someone who has moved from a 3rd world nation to the US, this part of the west scares me. The lack of assistance from your local and blood community is one of the west's greatest short comings. I for one, hope never to give that part of my 3rd world self up. Individuality and Independance, should not mean distancing yourself from your support system. Or so I hope.
- lwhi 3y agoWe used to have a reasonable welfare state in the UK, where the government took that duty upon itself. It's been wrecked by the current right-wing government.
- dudul 3y ago> The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog. Maybe he passed away. Maybe she left him because she just wanted the kid. I don't know why you assume wrongdoing while, as you pointed out, no details is given.
- yardstick 3y ago> Jack really did suffer alone. Not due to the lack of others help. Sure, one of her brothers didn’t help, but her parents fed her and helped her during her pregnancy. The father of the son shares responsibility. See the below Guardian article[1]. I get the feeling she is one of those people who is an exceptionally brilliant narrator, knows how to captivate and truly reach their audience. Like a lot of politicians and public figures. 1. https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-interview https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-...
- donjorgenson 3y agoHero
- brvsft 3y ago[flagged]
- MichaelRo 3y ago>> My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke >> Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. Well this doesn't sound like someone who is destitute and with no safety net whatsoever. What's so wrong living with your parents? For most of human history it was the normal thing to do. Parents will take care of kids and one of them will inherit the parent's house and take care of the old parents. Have his own kids and have the grandparents helping with raising them. Also I'm not so sure about UK but around here there's quite a significant rural population. Not everyone can or wants to make it in the big city. Life in the countryside is a lot cheaper, everything's cheaper. House prices are a joke compared to big cities and still villages get slow but steady depopulated. On the other hand I do know people, excluding the homeless, who really have nothing. Father lost the apartment to gambling then disappeared, mother died, kid got evicted in the street in the middle of the winter, worked heavy construction jobs until got sick and had to file for disability and now all his income is a miserable pension that can't even pay for food let alone a rent in the city. And he's better off than the homeless or the gypsies who live off the city's garbage dump. So I'm not saying the author has it easy but rather than some of it is a deliberate choice.
- PuffinBlue 3y agoShe doesn’t have a car or license. So living in the countryside in the UK is a non-starter. When you’re living life on hard mode already due to poverty and the pernicious destruction of control over your own time that that causes, trying to exist without personal transport and a child is impossible. I know. I’ve experienced it first hand (as the kid). To your point about deliberate choice: What I do recognise from the article, and it was clear before she mentioned it, were the signs and symptoms or untreated trauma and ADHD. The deleterious effect of those conditions on decision making often seem to us observers as ‘deliberate choices’. This can be very frustrating for those of us who would and do make different choices in similar situations.
- Taurenking 3y ago[dead]
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- steve_adams_86 3y agoThe first portion of this had me thinking constantly “this person must have ADHD”. It was almost a relief when it was mentioned. I feel like this is the dark side of the condition that isn’t talked about as much. If you have adhd, you are far more likely to wind up suicidal, in poverty, abusing drugs, etc. But these things occur on a spectrum. That is to say, far more of us still might not be in abject poverty, but the same tendencies and deficiencies hold us down and cause disproportionate suffering. It’s a constant struggle not to let it pull you even further down. You might not be in the suicide/poverty/drug abuse part of the statistic, but you might be working pretty hard not to be. It’s not a great way to exist, sometimes. Although I own a nice home and have a good job now, I don’t think I’ll ever have a sense of security or safety, or even stop having the internal sense that I’m still living in poverty. It’s hard to shake that.
- PuffinBlue 3y agoYes I thought this too. Perhaps because it mirrored my experience of similar situations. I glad to see a comment like yours because it could mean we’re starting to recognise this condition in adult women a little more than we have been over the last few decades. That gives me hope! Not least because i have seen the horrible impact it can have if left untreated.
- Graziano_M 3y agoIt's worth listening to this episode of Blocked and Reported on Jack Monroe: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-literally-unbelievable https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-literally-u... tl;dr: She's not exactly honest about being poor.
- goatsi 3y agoHow are we supposed to listen to that? It's behind a paywall.
- Graziano_M 3y agoSorry. Here is something you can read. https://katieroche.net/jack_monroe_investigation_main.html https://katieroche.net/jack_monroe_investigation_main.html
- avgcorrection 3y agoI dunno why people who clearly, viscerally project that they are from the “unfortunates” outgroup so insist that it is their “choices” that landed them there. Clearly they look down on them and don’t feel that their status is going to improve by haranguing them. It’s easier to understand the social proof chasers who easily adapt to the milieu of privilege-speak; then they fall over themselves to insist that they are from an even more disenfranchised background than the previous speaker—and certainly that they are humble too, oh so humble, because they might be in the top income bracket but right over there gestures to old friends for the Grace of God go I.
- 3dprintscanner 3y agoWould it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ’tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread. George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier
- easytiger 3y agoContext on this post from 2020 on a now widely discredited person - https://tattle.life/wiki/jack-monroe/ https://tattle.life/wiki/jack-monroe/
- distcs 3y ago> still don’t have contents insurance (a hangover from poverty, I just wasn’t in the habit of insuring things and now keep putting it off, because paperwork terrifies me) The author seems to be from UK. Is contents insurance a thing in UK? How many renters really do buy contents insurance? Genuinely interested to know how many think that contents insurance is worth it?
- dontlaugh 3y agoI did for a short while. Then I realised I don't own anything of sufficient value to be worth it long term.
- coremoff 3y agoI've had content insurance as a renter before, and it was useful (my flat was burgled; my flatmate did not have insurance). That was a while ago, when things like CDs were still targetted by theives, and I got everything replaced, which would have cost me thousands. I still keep contents insurance; haven't claimed on it more than once in a couple decades though - it's there for the case where my appartment is destroyed (I live in a block of flats), and it's nice to have the lost property/damaged devices cover for travel and general use.
- ska 3y agoFWIW, I've seen rental contracts that insisted on it. I imagine it varies by jurisdiction how legal/enforceable that is.
- ReptileMan 3y agoIt takes great amount of skill to be mostly right and still come out as extremely entitled and unsympathetic. She passes with flying colors. But reading her wikipedia controversy section - exactly what I expect from professional activist turned grifter >In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture."[56] Hattenstone wrote "The guru of thriftiness was chucking away tens of thousands of pounds, given to her by the public to support her work, on items she didn't even want, let alone need", noting that she didn't deny she'd "abused the goodwill of well-meaning backers".[13] >Writing for Pink News in September 2022, Lily Wakefield noted that Monroe has "faced accusations of inventing experiences of living in poverty",[57] while in October 2022 Killian Fox noted in The Guardian that "critics claim that she makes herself out to be poorer than she actually is".[58][57] 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"
- scythe 3y agoThe author suggests her work applies to "obesity", but she is not obese. The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong (the link below supports me). Many of her examples in fact deal with people who can't afford things that aren't food, like a kitchen, or free time. On the one hand, it's certainly true that the support for the poor is insufficient, but the price of food, being perhaps the lowest it has been in thousands of years in real terms, is probably the wrong lever to pull. Consequently, "food poverty" is a misclassification, since, while spending £7 per week on food, she probably spent more on transportation, housing and possibly clothing (which can be essential to actually getting work), and it would make more of a difference to tackle that. (She recounts severe problems getting a home!) If she had been able to spend half as much on food, would that meaningfully improve her life? An extra £3.5 per week isn't yanking anyone out of poverty. In fact, there is more evidence that obesity causes poverty than that poverty contributes to obesity! See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/ There are some suggestions that deficiencies in certain minerals, particularly zinc, which is most concentrated in relatively expensive foods like beef and oysters, are correlated with obesity and disordered eating. A bottle of zinc gluconate makes potatoes look like matsutake (at least at wholesale prices), but the safe and effective use of the supplements (avoiding overuse) is not well established or normally recommended. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-020-02060-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-020-02060-8 The point I guess I want to make is that we should have compassion for the author, but that compassion should ignite the best faculties of our minds — the desire to really understand the problem, because that is where solutions come from.
- bluedino 3y ago> The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong US, not the UK: Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties. Back to Europe: The Paradox of Poverty and Obesity Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals. Another cause of obesity is low physical activity, which among the poor is associated with a lack of money for sports equipment.
- brindlejim 3y agoReeks of self-pity. At what point does Monroe own her choices and their consequences? She did have a child while she was economically precarious, and chose to. No one forced her.
- zubairq 3y agoGood article
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- SilverBirch 3y agoThis is one of the things that makes me just generally angry about politics. It's very clear that Jack is right, being in poverty isn't about pick Y ingredient instead of X, it's a complex interaction of a thousand ways in which your life is difficult - not the least of which is living in a society of people who want to blame you for the things you are the victim of. It's obviously true what Jack says, and the people who espouse the right wing view of poverty being the fault of the poor often fall into this trap - make a stupid suggestion that indicates they know nothing about the issue. What's frustrating though is that the people making these stupid suggestions never actually engage with the clear and obvious shortcomings in their philosophy. They have taken a stupid position, it results in them making dumb comments, and when it's pointed out that what they're saying is dumb... they either just ignore or double down. It makes you wonder what on earth this person is doing in politics given their quite clear lack of interest in the real lived experience of the people she would wish to rule over.
- gwern 3y agoBefore reading this essay, it may be useful to get some biographical background on the author, as she talks a lot about isolated snippets but otherwise provides no context for her life and how she got where she did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoNever ate preserved potatoes, are they any good? It's so easy to cook potatoes today with the instant pots, why buy preserves? Or is that the peeling work that is beyond the dignity of the 'poor' person?