Who cannot admire the poverty campaigner and food writer Jack Monroe? She has a tireless work ethic, coupled with fiery imaginative tenacity to get change done — and her most recent campaign took on the Office for National Statistics and won. While the Tory party and the Prime Minister thrashed about chaotically, Monroe got on with highlighting the impact of food inflation on those for whom providing even one family meal per day is a crushing, debilitating battle. She described an elderly man who told her his dinner had been a spoonful of toothpaste, “in order to fool himself into thinking he had chewed, swallowed, tasted and digested something”.
For those not familiar with the story, Monroe spotted how rising prices for cheaper foods (and other basic goods), coupled with a reduction in the cheaper food lines many survive on, was having a far worse inflationary effect on the poorest households than was being recorded by the ONS.
