Jack Monroe Quotes

There were times when I couldn't even buy a loaf of bread.

For a long time, I couldn't even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.

My dad was a civil servant before he retired, and my mum worked, too. We could not always get three meals in a day; sometimes we'd struggle.

What's happened to society is we've become really pretentious. But there was a time in my life where I really had to choose between boiling potatoes and paying my gas bill, so I'd buy a can of potatoes.

I know what it's like not to have food in the fridge or money to buy more.

It's really hard to be poor in New York - I was really poor when I lived in New York.

I used to sit in front of McDonald's and ask people for dollars to get me a cheeseburger. It was bad.

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.

A lot of people don't know what it's like to actually be hungry. I do. I've also slept on the streets.

I know what poverty is.

Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.

I had to work to eat. I couldn't even complete a basic elementary education.

I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.

I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.

I started when I was 39 as a cabinet secretary, and so I feel like I have lived an experience in my life where I can relate to families that struggle, and are scraping by and scrounging.

I didn't have a dollar to my name in 2006.

I have been down and out, living in Brooklyn, no money even for a subway, no food whatsoever. Like, I remember just sitting in my room all day - even my television wasn't working!

I was homeless for almost a year and a half, just living in my car or bouncing around peoples' houses, going to 7-Eleven at the end of the day and asking them for the taquitos that they were going to throw out because I hadn't eaten in two days.

We had to leave Norway and go where it was all happening, which was London. We loved it there, but it was hard. We had no money - we were literally starving. It started to get ugly.

I know what it's like to have to put back food at the checkout line because you don't have enough money and those kinds of things.

I kept auditioning, with no savings and no money, credit card debt gaining interest. I went on unemployment. I bought ramen noodles at dollar stores. I never had to - God forbid - live on the streets.

I've lived in poverty.

Growing up in a very poor orphanage in Ukraine, there wasn't much food.

My parents used to struggle to put food on our plates. Whatever little money they got, we had to make do with it.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family... Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.