Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.
Actually if you were to buy a bag of dried lentils it would cost you a couple of quid. Some people don't have that to spend in the first place. And not everyone wants to eat lentils.
We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods such as tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.
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.
Food is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.
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.
My pregnancy changed my relationship with my body because I went from despising it to marvelling at what it can do.
I spent 18 months with the furniture parked in front of the radiators, cooking as quickly as I possibly could to use the least amount of gas and electricity. I unscrewed the lightbulbs in the hallway, unplugged everything at the wall so not even the LCD display was blinking away on the oven.
Cheese is one of the world's great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own.
People nag me about my weight, my cooking, my tattoos, my hair, my sexuality, everything. I can deal with all that because I'm still doing my job and I kind of like myself.
I was a young mother with a dependent. I went from nice flat and fire service job to cold and hungry with a child. I lived rough for two years, with six months relying on the food bank.
I'm not organised, and I don't cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I'm chaotic. Always have been.
Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.
Working behind the cocktail bar was a different kind of escapism, a creative outlet with a newfound respect for alcohol. I didn't drink as I was also working day shifts in a coffee shop and, later, the fire service, and needed my wits about me to pull off my 60-hour working weeks.
It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.
I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.
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.
Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans, lentils, are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of surprising meals.
But I know that trying to black out my past with oblivion will just damage my future. I made the decision to stop running from my fears, and to walk slowly and deliberately towards self-nurture, self-respect, and better mental and physical health.
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.
