Jack Monroe Hunger Hurts

Jack Monroe’s blog post: Hunger Hurts is a very poignant piece of writing which she wrote in 2012 and very honestly describes the upsetting truths of living in poverty in 21^st century Britain. She writes ‘This morning, small boy had one of the last Weetabix, mashed with water, with a glass of tap water to wash it down with. ‘Where’s Mummys breakfast?’ he asks, big blue eyes and two year old concern. I tell him I’m not hungry, but the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar. But these are the things that we do’. This is truly upsetting to read especially as we see the innocence of her two year old son who is too young to comprehend the awful reality of poverty but also still realises that his mother is not eating breakfast. Monroe doesn't give her son a name perhaps showing he is just one of the many children in this situation. Also ‘the weetabix mashed with water' is a disgusting combination but shows the lack of milk (a basic ingredient) to make breakfast. The fact that it is ‘one of the last weetabix’ adds further to their desperate state. Weetabix is a brand we are all familiar with and is a popular breakfast choice but when it is mixed with water instead of milk we realise the dire situation Monroe and her son faced and instead makes it something very unpleasant.  The rumblings of Monroe’s stomach and the disgusting combination of water and Weetabix convey very powerfully the true condition of food poverty in modern day Britain.  She however normalises this situation by saying ‘But these are the things that we do’  which  also suggests her exhaustion with life.

‘Now I’m not only in arrears, but last night when I opened my fridge to find some leftover tomato pasta, an onion, and a knob of stem ginger, I gave the pasta to my boy and went to bed hungry with a pot of home made ginger tea to ease the stomach pains.’ This shows the sacrifice of a parent and often it's the parents who suffer the most as their main concern is feeding the child. She basically has an empty fridge and the ginger tea she makes to ease the pangs of hunger actually sounds like something from a novel about poverty in the Victorian era.   

She ends her post by saying ‘Poverty isn’t just having no heating, or not quite enough food, or unplugging your fridge and turning your hot water off. It’s not a tourism trade, it’s not cool, and it’s not something that MPs on a salary of £65k a year plus expenses can understand, let alone our PM who states that we’re all in this together. 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.' Here, she talks about what true poverty is which often is never discussed. It entails unplugging the fridge or hot water and pawning household items for food. It is also a 'sinking feeling' when you don’t even have enough bread and jam when your young child asks for more food. I feel these sentiments are often missing when discussing food poverty in Britain today.