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.

She raised about £2,000, paid off her rent, gas and electricity and used the rest as a deposit and first month’s rent on a smaller flat, so that she wouldn’t fall into arrears again. “I figured we’d just have to pick up the pieces with what we had left,” she says.

And so here we are, working out who’s going to sit in the solitary chair. I end up on a footstool.

You could respond to that story in one of two ways. Many who read Monroe’s blog, A Girl Called Jack, have found it sad that a 25-year-old single mother in the sixth-richest country in the world should be forced to such a desperate impasse.

She started blogging from her Nokia pay-as-you-go (she had no computer), “ranting at the internet” after she was angered that a councillor referred to “druggies, drunks and single mothers”.

It evolved into an account of how she managed to feed Jonny tasty, nutritious meals on as little as £10 a week.

Her recipes, such as Super Kale Pesto (15p) and Mumma Jack’s Best Ever Chilli (39p) have now earned her a cookery column in The Guardian and a book contract with Penguin. Her good looks and embattled cheer made her a poster girl for resourceful austerity.

Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone could fault Monroe, who is now off benefits and earning a small income as a freelance writer.

But Monroe came in for particular criticism over her recipe for kale pesto. “Kale is basically cabbage,” she says incredulously.

“Kale Pesto is basically cabbage, cheese and oil, but if I called it that, no one would have wanted to eat it. If I call it kale pesto, I’m getting above myself. Perhaps what annoys these people is that kale pesto is the sort of thing they’d pay 15 quid for in a restaurant.”

Actually, she has researched and found that penny-for-penny, kale has the best nutrition per cost ratio, along with sardines and spinach.

She is currently recreating supermarket ready meals for cheaper than the originals on her site — including 75p macaroni cheese for 45p and a lasagne that dares to use free-range pork. You don’t survive on the margins without appreciating these details.

Can you take a minute to help @MsJackMonroe ask the govt to end #foodpoverty in the UK in the #Budget2014? http://t.co/ijoIL9ZLAv — Oxfam GB Campaigns (@oxfamcampaigns) March 17, 2014

Jamie Oliver just can’t match her. She points out that in his recent book, Save With Jamie, all of his recipes call for Uncle Ben’s rice. “That’s not really a money- saver, is it? If you really cared about saving money you’d pay 40p a kilo for long-grain rice. I’ve been approached countless times by various brands like that. I wouldn’t rule it out — I do need to earn money. But I couldn’t endorse anything that wasn’t the best possible value.”

Food waste is a particular source of dismay. “What’s that statistic, £60 a week worth of food goes in the bin? I don’t even spend that in a month! If your potatoes are sprouting, just plant them. Bread? Toast it, freeze it, make croutons, or breadcrumbs to put on pasta, panzanella with a tin of tomatoes…”

She gets a lot of her resourcefulness from her parents. Her dad was an officer in the fire brigade and served in the Falklands too; her mother was a nurse but had to leave due to a medical condition and so became a full-time foster carer.

“The philosophy of the household was: If you’ve got something, help someone else out with it. My mum could have sat on her arse. She couldn’t work so she decided to foster children instead. There was always an extra bit of room at the table for the night, or the week, or 13 years if need be.”

There’s a lengthy post on her blog explaining exactly why she was forced to leave the fire brigade. “I loved that job and my colleagues, so I didn’t want to badmouth it, but when people say that I quit my job to live on benefits, that’s just so untrue.”

The problem was that no one would look after a child during her night shifts — which were hard to predict, week-to-week.

Jonny’s father helped as far as he could but her attempts to negotiate flexible working hours and alternative positions came to nothing. “It was such a complicated situation. I know that not everyone needs childcare for shift work — but some of us do. He was being passed round from pillar to post. Poor kid. I was very young when I had him, so I didn’t think a lot about how I’d cope but I knew it was inherently wrong to foist your kid on other people the whole time. I think it’s partly ’cos my parents are foster carers, so I grew up with children who’d had disjointed and traumatic upbringings. I saw the damage that had done. I was just so scared that my precious darling boy would end up like that.”

The stress eventually caused her to overdose on sleeping pills and beta blockers. “I woke up in hospital and thought: That’s enough. This has to stop.”

She says the overdose wasn’t an accident. “I maintained that it was for quite a while to friends and family ’cos I didn’t want social services to get involved. It was a low point one-off as I just couldn’t see an end to it all.”

In fact, such was Monroe’s determination that she is now free from the cycle. Her reports of local council meetings led to her being hired by the Southend Echo and now she writes regularly for The Guardian. Such is their largesse that she can spend as much as £15-£20 on her weekly food budget as opposed to a tenner.

Jack is openly gay. “If I get asked any question most, it’s how have you got a kid if you’re gay,” she laughs. “I didn’t hand my womb in when I came out. A lot of people have relationships with men before they realise they’re gay. I was in a relationship, had my son, and it was only afterwards that I realised that this wasn’t right.”

She is so articulate, I wonder if she has thought about standing as an MP, and she doesn’t dismiss it. But she has seen enough of politics to know it’s a dirty business and believes she can currently do most as a campaigner. “Regardless of how I ended up in the circumstances that I did, one of the main things I want to do is to make sure no one else ends up like that. Me and a very young boy were in a freezing cold flat, wrapped up in jumpers, struggling to feed ourselves. It was a miserable, shoddy existence. And I just don’t think anyone should have to go through that.”

agirlcalledjack.com/