Put out a book about surviving on a budget with some money saving tips that people are taking the p*ss out of big style.
Viz Top Tips type stuff like 'If you can't afford a tin opener you can open your beans with a hammer and a knife', and 'Mop your floor with your tumble dryer water'. If you don't have a round pastry cutter you can sand down the edges of a tuna can apparently and use that.
Can openers are 50p at Tesco and most skint folk don't have, or can't afford to run, a tumble dryer.
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I think for some critics it's partly the suggestion that she's still poor when she's had lots of books, been on TV etc. On the other hand she says she has ADHD and has posted some odd random stuff in the past so I can believe she doesn't manage her money very well.
I thought about starting a thread on her last year when there was a bit of a fuss, as it's quite interesting how we lionise people and then knock them down (sometimes deserved, sometimes not).
Most cans have ring pulls these days anyhow.
Jack seems overwhelmingly like a force for good on the whole.
Even if they're not living in dire poverty now, it's an experience they've had and will be aware of the realities, the depressing effect on both physical and mental health, self esteem etc.
Of course if they want books published by the mainstream there will be a requirement to 'nice things up' a bit not rock the boat or be so radical socialist as to make relatively comfortably off publishing execs feel uncomfortable.
I sometimes come across 'well meaning, not quite getting it' type people in the food system change / food sovereignty movement.
They'll suggest that it's all about education, and that we just need to teach these people in how to make wholesome casseroles out of root vegetables, and cheaper cuts of meat.
Whereas the problems are far more systemic than that.
Overpriced and insecure housing, lack of facilities, yes education , but also a 'food culture' crafted, controlled and sold back to those on low incomes, by an extractive industrialised systems that's no kind of 'culture' at all, and which is causing so many problems in the first place.
We had a good old rant last night about dear old George Monbiot and how he really doesn't really quite get it on the food and farming front either.
So much of what he says is often correct , but he also is trying to replace one oversimplified industrialised monoculture (factory farming of animals) with another industrialised system of plant (and factory plant) based food, which is also not 'sustainable.
It's a lot of number crunching and broad brush solutions.
Such as saying it takes X no. of acres to raise a lamb to kill weight, and that therefore all the sheep should be removed, and that those acres should instead be used to produce plant food for humans .
Whereas detailed multilayered multifunctional agroecological food production systems are so much more complex, and interdependent than that.
That would be a fun dinner party - George and Jack come round for tea and we chow down on these meaty issues..
