How a girl called Jack changed her life with dirt-cheap chilli

Jack Monroe began blogging about cooking meals for half nothing when her weekly food budget was under a tenner. Here she tells Richard Godwin about turning her life around with dirt-cheap chilli.

THERE isn’t much furniture in Jack Monroe’s flat in Southend-on-Sea. No sofa, no TV, just the one chair. A couple of years ago, Monroe left her job at the Essex Fire Brigade, as the stress of bringing up her son Jonny, now three, as a single mother working irregular night shifts was making both of them ill. It meant losing a £27,000 (€32,000) income — and selling everything they owned in order to make ends meet.

“I started selling the odd item on eBay for £5 or £6 here and there but it didn’t make much of a difference,” she says. She would have had a car boot sale but she’d sold her car, so she set up a Facebook group, put everything in her front room and invited the world to take it away, hoping they wouldn’t rip her off. Most people realised how desperate her situation was and chose not to. “Jonny’s toys, that was quite hard, to see all the things I’d chosen for him go. I had to tell him that mummy had had a tidy-up,” she says.