New TV pitch idea. Me & Annunziata Rees Mogg both get given three quid a day and a family of four to feed for a month. Living in adjacent too-small flats on 12th floor with broken lift and miles from the supermarket. No car. Barely any kitchen equipment. See who cracks up first.

You start with completely empty cupboards and £3 in change, mostly coppers you have to feed into the self service machine in the supermarket because you’re embarrassed to hand the massive pile of change to a human being. What’s your first meal for four going to be, @zatzi?

And it has to be a dinner, because if you’re only having one meal a day it needs to be a substantial one. Aim for 1500 calories per adult and try to balance it as best you can. You’ve got no storecupboard supplies, two hobs, no oven. Over to you.

This was my life, although I did have an oven, I unplugged my fridge and freezer because I couldn’t afford to run them. I’ve written about it extensively and that’s how I started writing cookbooks, for anyone who doesn’t know the origin story, start here: https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2012/07/30/hunger-hurts/

I have spent the past seven years advising and lobbying the Government on food poverty, from Frank Fields Feeding Britain enquiry to the Foodbank debate in the HoC to the School Food Plan to the Food Strategy and many many others...

... as well as raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for food banks and giving away thousands of cookbooks to people in poverty, and all of my work for free online because if something isn’t free it’s not accessible to people who need it most.

And she, daughter of a Baron, has contributed the price difference of different kinds of potatoes.

You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, reach out. I’m very happy to put politics aside on this and talk about what works

I do a lot of work on this that I don’t talk about and I won’t embarrass them by naming them here, but you’d be genuinely surprised at the people who come to me for advice about food poverty in their constituencies because they genuinely want to understand and make a change.

(And yes I do always check their voting records and constituency statistics first because it’s important to understand what someone’s values are compared to what they tell you they are, but also to know which knots to unravel and where to start.)

(Now I really do have to get out of here!)