Actually if you were to buy a bag of dried lentils it would cost you a couple of quid. Some people don't have that to spend in the first place. And not everyone wants to eat lentils.
Jack Monroe
I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.
I'm not organised, and I don't cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I'm chaotic. Always have been.
Working 90 hours a week is easily racked up when you're self-employed and rely on portable tech to do your work; your train journeys, toilet breaks, leisurely walks, bedtime, can all become 'working hours'. Reclaim them.
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 is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.
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.
A startling confession for a food writer: all through high school, I struggled with a severe eating disorder.
Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.
For some people, pronouns are a very important part of how they identify. I completely understand that. For me, I have more of a looser interpretation.
We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods such as tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.
I'm publicist, patron of nine charities, creative director, food consultant, recipe developer - and mum.
All my politics and campaigning has been around issues that affect women: violence against women, welfare cuts to women.
I had no fake ID and looked 14 until my first grey hairs came in a couple of years ago.
Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.
I have a surprisingly large appetite anyway and I don't drive, I walk everywhere, I don't sit down at the moment and I pace the hallway when I'm on the phone. I think that if I didn't eat large amounts of carbs and cheese I would wither away into a husk.
Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup.
We hear time and again what a prosperous, affluent country Britain is, the sixth richest in the world. But aren't we ashamed that people who need emergency food handouts are eating cold beans and stewed steak from the tin, or handing it back, because they can't even heat it up?
Gas prices and train fares seem to be the two commodities for modern British life that base their prices on a whim, or numbers plucked out of thin air, without a thought to the real cost to those for whom those price hikes mean unimaginable sacrifices in their day to day lives.
Learning to cook at school gave me the confidence to experiment in the kitchen when I left home in my late teens - I wasn't intimidated by it.
Not all Tories are atrocious heartless fiends, I concede. But those who wield hunger as a weapon while claiming their own meals on expenses, are beyond satire.
The thing with my recipes is, I don't have hours to faff about in the kitchen. My recipes are all 15, 20 minute, chop it up and stick it in the oven.
It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator.
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.
My pregnancy changed my relationship with my body because I went from despising it to marvelling at what it can do.
I spent 18 months with the furniture parked in front of the radiators, cooking as quickly as I possibly could to use the least amount of gas and electricity. I unscrewed the lightbulbs in the hallway, unplugged everything at the wall so not even the LCD display was blinking away on the oven.
Cheese is one of the world's great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own.
People nag me about my weight, my cooking, my tattoos, my hair, my sexuality, everything. I can deal with all that because I'm still doing my job and I kind of like myself.
Working behind the cocktail bar was a different kind of escapism, a creative outlet with a newfound respect for alcohol. I didn't drink as I was also working day shifts in a coffee shop and, later, the fire service, and needed my wits about me to pull off my 60-hour working weeks.
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.
It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.
Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans, lentils, are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of surprising meals.
But I know that trying to black out my past with oblivion will just damage my future. I made the decision to stop running from my fears, and to walk slowly and deliberately towards self-nurture, self-respect, and better mental and physical health.
Until people realise benefits doesn't mean scrounger, and austerity isn't a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there's still a lot of work to do.
There's all kinds of research that shows children operate best if they start the day with some proper food inside them - it's a no-brainer.
But it's a disgrace that food banks are needed in the first place, patching up the holes left by an inefficient and downright barbaric attack on the meagre safety net of what remains of a notion of 'social security'.
The last time I celebrated a special occasion, I hashed together a paella with some chicken, some frozen veg, long-grain rice, chilli and a shake of turmeric for colour - and it didn't disappoint.
Even in my genre, cookery, just look who gets on the television. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater. All very nice men. All white middleflclass men.
We need to aim to get rid of food banks altogether, and replace charitable intervention with a fairer, more equal society.
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.
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.
Don't say things about people that aren't true... because there are consequences for that.
Many families teeter on the edges, not qualifying for the little support on offer, unwilling to seek it for fear of drawing attention to a household barely holding the pieces together, or hit by unexpected bills.
I left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn't fun any more.
During my time at Essex county fire and rescue service, barely a shift went by without receiving a call from an elderly person who had fallen in their home, or from their concerned neighbour or carer.
When I was at my lowest point I had a lot of help from charities, food banks, to see me through so it is nice to start to give something back.
I'm very careful with the money I have, I pay myself the living wage, and I try to save the rest, because if life has taught me one thing it's that you never know what is around the corner.
I put my son's nutritional needs first, and existed on pasta and thin air more times than I would dare to admit.
In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.
You don't see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!
