A little over a year ago, Linda Tirado finished a shift as a night cook in a pancake restaurant in Utah and, while winding down online before bed, quickly penned a blogpost titled “Why I make terrible decisions”. The essay, on the realities of trying to survive grinding poverty on menial wages in the US, went viral almost instantly, and was republished on various news siteswith over seven million views across all platforms. While working shifts in the diner amid the attention that engulfed her, Tirado stuck scribbled post-it notes on the wall next to the grill to form a book proposal that has emerged as Hand to Mouth, a first-hand account of getting by in the US on low wages, that has earned plaudits from many writers including Barbara Ehrenreich.

“I think I resonated because I didn’t realise I was writing an article. I thought I was talking to my friends. And so I wasn’t guarded,” Tirado explains. “No one ever says ‘I’m objectively in a shit situation, let me tell you about it’ because we’re all so ashamed. I never have been ashamed. Because it really isn’t my fault that 30 years ago, the entire country decided that quarterly profits were way more important than my generation’s future. And when millions of us are stuck in the exact same situation, you can’t objectively look at us and say: ‘This is your fault, individually’,” she says.

Tirado, 32, now writes and speaks full-time, for various magazines and newspapers, on poverty, politics and economics. On a short visit to the UK to publicise her book, she is learning a little more about the UK’s experience of poverty. The bedroom tax, in particular, draws an exasperated response. “I guess if you’re trying to make sure that nobody ever has anything like privacy or space or luxury, it’s a really good policy,” she quips.

Tirado comes from a country with a long history of food banks, in contrast to Britain’s recent boom. So what’s her response to the findings and recommendations of the all-party parliamentary report on hunger and poverty in the UK?

“The working classes suffer from low wages, not low resilience. It’s ridiculous to think the problem is a lack of food countrywide,” she says. “Any commission which aims to abolish hunger and does not first and foremost address income is an exercise in self-indulgence.”

At various points over the last 16 years, Tirado has relied on food banks and food stamps to feed her family. On an earlier trip to the UK this year, she visited a Trussell Trust food bank in Westminster to compare the US and UK experiences for the Guardian. “American food banks are full of days-old bread; it’s rare to find vegetables, and if you do, it’s corn – there’s all the creamed corn in the world. Wealthy people love cleaning their pantry out of all of the things they bought for one recipe, so they’re full of odds and ends you’re never going to use,” she says.

But is there any truck to be had with Lord Freud’s insistence that food banks aren’t driven by demand? “And if toilets didn’t exist, people wouldn’t use them either,” she replies. “Sure, if you offer people a resource people will use it, but the lack of a resource doesn’t mean the need wasn’t there.”

Much of Tirado’s initial essay and parts of her book strive to demystify what appear to be the destructive life choices and economic decisions people in poverty make, such as smoking when you’re struggling to pay your bills and feed your family. “If I’d had access to doctors and things that would relieve the health and mental health conditions, I probably wouldn’t have started smoking. You want people to stop smoking? Put Xanax over the counter. Give me the antidepressants.”

Tirado still seems uncomfortable with her sudden relative fame, and the drastic change to her position in life. She’s now regularly invited to lecture, speak and consult at universities, political meetings and by businesses. “I’ve been to the White House, and spoken at the London School of Economics, but my favourites are the one-person charities, where someone’s like: ‘Hey, there’s this problem in my community,’ and then they go and fix it as well as they can. And the beauty of my new life is now I have rich-people networks and I can connect them to resources that they never knew existed,” she says.

Has the American Dream changed with the economic slump and the lack of opportunity for so many in the US? “The American dream is different to what it used to be. Now the American Dream is you’ll go viral on the internet, or you’ll win American Idol. It’s about achieving great heights, and before it was that you would be comfortable, and then if you were also ambitious and lucky, anybody could attain those heights.”Dropping out of college at 16, Tirado worked on a number of political campaigns, canvassing and organising volunteers, before she realised she didn’t have the connections, or wealth, to complete the endless internships she would need to get further. After falling into poverty during her first pregnancy, she worked in countless low-paid jobs, often working two jobs with the equivalent of zero-hours contracts in an attempt to make ends meets. “I didn’t have any hope that my situation would get better and if you’re intelligent, you don’t spend much time hoping for that because it’s just beating your head against a brick wall. But I was hopeful I would find love; I was hopeful I would have a really great Friday night with my friends. We just have small hope. We don’t hope for large systemic things. I think people misunderstand that.”

So what’s the answer to the entrenched in-work poverty we see in the US and UK? “In my utopia, companies would realise the same thing Henry Ford did, which is that if you make sure the population cannot afford your product, your company’s going to go over pretty quickly. If government stops subsidising these companies, then it wouldn’t be affordable for them to pay low wages and have zero-hours contracts.”

Ultimately, Tirado wants to show that poverty affects everyone in society, because one small life event could tip almost anyone into precarity. “Anybody can lose their job or have a horrific accident. And if you create a society, you have to create a society that works for everybody. Or you have to admit that you’re no longer a society.”

• To order Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado for £11.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

Curriculum vitae



Age 32

Family Married, two children.

Lives Washington, DC.

Education Cedar City high school, Utah; Southern Utah University, Utah.

Career 2014-present: author and journalist; 1996-2013: some hundred jobs and temp work, including manager at fast food restaurants, such as Burger King, farm work, cashier, cook, bartender, club manager, receptionist, secretary, maid, mechanic, production-line worker, car washer, nanny and political canvasser.

Book Hand To Mouth: The truth about being poor in a wealthy world

Interests Reading, knitting, watching H Jon Benjamin cartoons.