Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My bark is far, far worse than my bite.
I moved back home to Southend in 2015 for a quieter life.
I look back and nearly all of my early jobs were in food.
Austerity is, devastatingly, not a party political issue.
I'm of Cypriot heritage, we have no concept of portion control.
You don't see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!
I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.
Food is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.
I had no fake ID and looked 14 until my first grey hairs came in a couple of years ago.
I live in a world where I want everyone to be able to put beurre blanc on the table for dinner.
I know that I can cook well on a low budget so I can't really justify spending a fortune on food.
It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.
I'm publicist, patron of nine charities, creative director, food consultant, recipe developer - and mum.
When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can't be rented out as a dwelling.
My politics are food-related - food banks, the living wage, zero hour contracts - and my food is political.
A startling confession for a food writer: all through high school, I struggled with a severe eating disorder.
I got over the whole British eating-with-hands phobia very quickly when I was working with Oxfam in Tanzania.
I'm not organised, and I don't cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I'm chaotic. Always have been.
I've had success, but I'm still haunted by the fear of being hungry. Once you've lived it it never leaves you.
Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.
I put my son's nutritional needs first, and existed on pasta and thin air more times than I would dare to admit.
I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.
As a kid we would eat moussaka with mash. We had a real fusion of two cultures that no-one has dared to fuse since.
Politics has become so polarised. We're stuck between the Ukip-lite Tories and Jeremy Corbyn. How is that a choice?
My pregnancy changed my relationship with my body because I went from despising it to marvelling at what it can do.
All my politics and campaigning has been around issues that affect women: violence against women, welfare cuts to women.
We need to aim to get rid of food banks altogether, and replace charitable intervention with a fairer, more equal society.
I'm doing my bit to encourage people to try vegan by making vegan food affordable and accessible and absolutely delicious.
In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.
Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans, lentils, are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of surprising meals.
Poverty took me from being the girl who was always the lead in the school play, to a woman who can't open her own front door.
I remember loving food tech because of the precision and the creativity, the weights and measures, the tiny glimpses of flavour.
It would be better to incentivise people into work with secure jobs and decent wages, than to try to starve them into submission.
Yes, scrambled eggs are lovely, and I've eaten them, and enjoyed them, and that was OK. Now I don't want to any more, and that's OK too.
Tinned food can be cheaper than buying fresh stuff. Things like tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, mushy peas make a good base for a soup.
There's all kinds of research that shows children operate best if they start the day with some proper food inside them - it's a no-brainer.
When I was at my lowest point I had a lot of help from charities, food banks, to see me through so it is nice to start to give something back.
Learning to cook at school gave me the confidence to experiment in the kitchen when I left home in my late teens - I wasn't intimidated by it.
The thing with my recipes is, I don't have hours to faff about in the kitchen. My recipes are all 15, 20 minute, chop it up and stick it in the oven.
I suffer panic attacks, anxiety attacks, seemingly random triggers that immobilise me, render me useless but simultaneously unable to explain myself.
Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education.
I have always been an oddball. I was a loner at school, and largely still am, preferring to shut myself away with my work and books than go to parties.
For some people, pronouns are a very important part of how they identify. I completely understand that. For me, I have more of a looser interpretation.
A lot of people don't feel heard. I want to take their concerns to MPs. If I have to stand seven times before I'm elected, I will. Call me Jack Farage.
You can pretty much make anything with a base of tinned tomatoes. If I don't have tinned tomatoes in my cupboard, I start to panic - it's a genuine thing.
I write cheap recipes for struggling families and single people, and have donated 800 copies of my newest cookery book to food banks and other good causes.
Even in my genre, cookery, just look who gets on the television. Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater. All very nice men. All white middleflclass men.
Not all Tories are atrocious heartless fiends, I concede. But those who wield hunger as a weapon while claiming their own meals on expenses, are beyond satire.
Until people realise benefits doesn't mean scrounger, and austerity isn't a fun middle-class way to grow your own vegetables, there's still a lot of work to do.
Talk to families in poverty and ask them what they need, instead of prescribing it for them. Ask what the barriers are. Ask what would help. And then deliver it.