Dear Daily Mail, please stop printing bullshit lies about me, because I have other things to do than correct them. Cheers.
Another poorly-researched Daily Mail article I find myself defending – tonight it was Liz Jones claiming that I use ‘cheap chicken with a side order of misery’. She referenced my latest Guardian recipe, a chicken casserole, where I used 4 chicken drums and thighs for £2. I (erroneously) didn’t add to the ingredients list that the chicken was free range – having blogged about choosing ethical meat here (Ethics v economics, choosing free range: http://agirlcalledjack.com/2013/10/16/ethics-vs-economics-choosing-free-range/) and using it in my sausage casserole recipe, pork lasagne recipe, et cetera, et cetera, I sort of figured that people had got the memo and I didn’t need to ram my lifestyle choices down anyone’s throats by repeating them again and again. I can say I use free range all I like – it doesn’t mean people aren’t going to pick up battery chicken if that’s all their budget stretches to, and I’m not going to act as judge and jury on that one. I have no right. Neither do I raise an eyebrow at people slipping corn-fed organic chickens into their baskets – hell, they taste GOOD, and meat is a personal choice.
But Liz, dear Liz Jones, seems to think she can judge people on the type of meat they eat. And in this case, WRONGLY.
The article lasted 30 minutes before MailOnline took it down, so I can spare your eyes from linking to it. The gist of it is here though:
And for the record, Mail journalists and commenters and everybody else – I ONLY EAT FREE RANGE MEAT. And if some weeks my budget doesn’t stretch to that, well, I have a pretty extensive repertoire of fab vegetarian recipes to fall back on.
I’ve written to the Mail and asked for an apology. I expect I’ll get the same fuck-all I had over the Littlejohn fiasco.
WHY OH WHY CAN A ‘NEWSPAPER’ PRINT SUCH SHIT LIES ABOUT SOMEONE AND GET AWAY WITH IT?
Mildly furious of Southend.
@msjackmonroe
Categories: Blog
the better you are doing, the more some people will just want to try and drag you down to their rather low level! set them straight, then move on and forget them, as you say, you have far better things to use your energy on 🙂
Not surprised. After all, it’s the Daily Mail Fail.
Hideous Daily Mail strikes again.
Don’t let it upset you 🙂
I feel for you Jack I really do x
Liz Jones is an idiot. Who listens to anything she says? I thought she only spoke about vacuous things like bags and cats and horses.
I work in the same industry and don’t know anyone who takes what she writes seriously. Easy to say, I know, but it’s not worth letting your blood pressure rise. I thought it interesting though that they’ve used two of their attack dogs on you – you must be doing something right to merit that kind of attention.
They will haunt you until you die and then post photographs of your grave photoshoped so it appears you have been buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.
I use Aldi their chicken is cheap a packet of drumsticks & thighs £1.99 a 1.65Kg chicken £3.99 Sunday dinner and most of the week from the chicken
This is, I believe, the same journalist that ran her column for months on tales of her poverty including such desperate tales of how her child’s private school fees were a bit of a stretch and how she might have to do without her horse at some point….. Now THATS misery!
Ha ha! Life’s SOOOO tough eh. Good one Jools. And to think she got PAID for that article -jeez, it makes me want to weep. How very dare she.
And Jack-you’re amazing! Don’t forget it!
I assume you’ve seen the Daily Mail song by Amanda Palmer. I play that every time they make me despair. It’s on repeat a lot.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eGPDWEjjN3Q
Liz Jones……oh PLUEEZ
Who cares what she thinks.
Upsetting the Daily Mail should be considered a badge of honour, when I look at the vile crap that is written there and the people who lap it up, I feel sorry for them.
Liz Jones is a miserable old bat. I can’t read anything of hers any more as it’s always too depressing and she’s always so sorry for herself. I can’t think why she still has a job; does anyone actually take notice of what she’s whining about? She’s an extremely tedious person; ignore her.
Poor lizzy jones jealousy is a bitch oh and the only side of misery was her I’ll take the cheap chicken though
In a way it’s kinda good that the Liz Jones of this world get their stuff published. That way it’s all out in the open and then they can get shot down for being such enormous twats. Keep on keeping on Jack, and if there is a small silver lining, it’s that this episode may well bring your recipes and words to some further people who need them.
Another vacuous tw*t who would have got ripped to bits last year over something she wrote, but it just flew over her brain cell.
One more person to ignore reading at all, unless she libels you and needs putting on a spit.
This sort of irresponsible “journalism” is why we need the full implementation of the Leveson Report. Until the DM and others are forced to prominently display an apology for each factual error that they make – especially when demeaning a member of the public – then they will carry on in there own despicable way. In the meantime, ignore it and rise above it – it is, after all, only the Daily Mail – “writtenby office boys for office boys” as Prime Minister Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury put it.
This is good free range is best
Liz Jones? If I’d wanted to hear from an arsehole, I would have farted myself.
(And “there” in an earlier comment should have read “their” – it’s past my bedtime.)
It was curious on the Guardian website where the recipe went up, how apparently different people BTL kept saying exactly what Liz Jones does, and you several times answered courteously saying “no, the chicken is free range, free range is all I eat” and a few comments later someone else would pop up and say ‘Urgh, miserable factory-farmed chicken’… almost as if they didn’t read before commenting. I wonder if any of the trolls were from the Daily Mail?
Rest assured, Jack, (if you had any doubts), the right wing will hate you and everything you stand for, because you expose some of the reality of what’s going on in this country and have not been cowed into fear and silence and private suffering, but are doing something about it and standing up for what you believe.
And they will use anything – anything irrelevant (tattoos! mirrored tiles!), loopy (you use kale! kale is middle-class! The middle classes are all as rich as George Osborne!) real or made up to get at you.
Nasty pieces of work that they are.
All signs you’re doing absolutely the right thing.
More power to you.
Liz Jones is known as being one of the worst journalists in the county like all Daily Fail contributors. Keep challenging them and maybe they will go away.
I contribute to The Daily Mail,(also The Guardian, The Telegraph and most other papers). Please don’t generalise-it’s the kind of thing the Daily Mail often does!!
Sometimes I agree with Liz Jones and sometimes I don’t. Now, perhaps, I will make a pile of her cuttings for the next year – one for 2015 toilet paper, the other reasonable discussion points.
I have little respect for Liz Jones’s journalistic integrity. I would not even use her articles to replace toilet paper. Don’t lose any sleep over the hateful hag.
As my Momma always said, “what others choose to say about you, says more about them than you!”
People like Liz Jones contribute to Urban Decay – why can’t we all just get along – why do we have to just be stabbing at each other all the time?
I wonder how they get away with too…I am sick of reading rubbish in the papers (which is why I’ve stopped reading them actually) because I’m sick of reading months later it was a load of bull…..I also wonder how long a paper can be allowed to repeatedly print mistruths about someone before they are held accountable…No wonder our planet is in such a mess when individuals with the back up of a bigger corporation can behave however they want with impunity.
Mind you at least take comfort in the fact that in the Mails case they repeatedly make themselves look foolish and now they’ve added another one to the list.
BTW, the article is still up!
You make these people feel threatened. That’s all there is to it. That means you are getting somewhere…
Sweetie, you are talking about Liz Jones. Liz Jones. No one – not even Daily Mail readers – takes that poor cow seriously anymore. If the Mail were to apologise for every stupid thing the woman says they would have to print a separate newspaper.
I love that they had to pull her poorly-researched piece of trash 30 minutes later.
Jack, just keep doing what your doing and ignore the haters!! They are possibly jealous of your success , and wish they knew how to cook successfully! …. Cheers me dear…… :-).
Okay for Liz to write about feeding her cat Marks & Spencer’s prawns, so not wholly embracing the vegan ethic, perhaps? And, since she boasts a number of cats and dogs, does she deny them their carnivorous nature by feeding them a vegan diet? Hmmm, questionable ethics.
I really wouldn’t worry about Liz Jones, Jack. She’s a committed vegetarian who has spent a lot of time documenting the horrors of the fur trade but still extols the virtues of ‘soft, buttery ‘- it is always ‘buttery’ – leather clothes. She seems to see no contradiction in this, and was recently photographed for a fashion article clad in leather leggings.
Recently she also wrote that she’d popped into Marks and Sparks to buy organic prawns for her cats. She’s always going on about her impoverished childhood, but I’m not sure she has any clear idea of what it is really like to feed a family on a few quid a week these days. In the past I have used cheap chicken, and quite a lot of ingredients that were less than ideal. I just tried not to think too hard about things. I had a kid to feed. Now, I have the luxury of being a little more choosy (and I no longer eat meat!). But I’m aware that it IS a luxury to be able to choose.
Please can someone recommend a good place to buy cheap free range chicken. I much, much prefer to buy free range if I can but have to say the price difference is some shops is scary. You can get a big barn raised chicken in Tesco for around a fiver but a free range one costs about twice that. You can also buy “value” chicken but wouldn’t touch that.
Take comfort. I don’t read this rag and am surprised by apparently intelligent people who do -unless researching for a sociology course. I went off chicken some years ago after some hard hitting programmes by TV chefs Even in Waitrose the fresh chickens had ammonia burns under their legs. How do you know that the chicken you eat is free range? Does that mean that they get a few extra square feet indoors? I enquired at my village butcher’s and he said that he could not sell organic chickens at £22 each. At a local posh farmer’s market (Wyken Hall,Suffolk)sellers admitted that their chicken was not organic. How does one distinguish various sorts of chicken? Is it how they are fed apart from run space? Can anyone out there tell me? I only shop at ASDA and Aldi now on grounds of being too hard up for anywhere else. Aldi seems fine so far.
I actually ask my Facebook friends not to share or click on links to the Daily Mail, even if they think they’re doing so with honourable intentions. It’s just a sack of lies and ignorance printed on shitty paper, and even just innocently looking at one of their stories on the website generates revenue for them, as if they’re not all quite rich enough.
Bigots will be bigots. There are plenty of people who think you’re awesome regardless, including me. Thank you for all that you do!
I do read the Daily Mail, but never take anything serious besides the articles about abandonned dogs and cats and their rescuers. For real news and interesting articles i go to other media outlets and your own site Jack 🙂
I read the Daily Mail for a good laugh. I read it online, otherwise I would use it to line the cat litter tray, which is all it is fit for.
My grandma always told me: “Never respond to a critic. It will only prove that they have succeeded in needling you. Far better to maintain a dignified silence”.
Jack, if you want us to fund some legal action for you to get a handsome apology and retraction from the Daily Mail, I’m sure many of us would be delighted.
misspiggy – count me in to. This has made so many of us so so angry. But great to see so many of us determined to fight back. We’ve had enough of it all. The times they are a’changing.
Hi jack. I really feel for you with all the rubbishyou have to deal with, but seriously, is all the swearing really necessary?
What she writes on her blog is her business. You don’t like it, you don’t have to read it. End of.
Bully bowes.
Don’t rise to it Jack, you represent all The Mail and its readers stand against in their ignorance and predjudice!
I’m surprised.
I did not know you were from Southend.
I am. Are you?
In my book being diss’d by the mail is the ultimate proof that you are doing something to be proud of.
No need to use foul language… Just chill everyone or she as won.. We are all adults after all aren’t we ??
Dear Jack,
in my book, if you have got the Mail frothing on your case you are definitely on the right track. It is a pity you will have waste your time pointing out the Nasty Paper’s errors though.
And I like reading your Blog
I am so sorry jack that you have had to put up with the bullshit of the daily mail. However, meat is meat and a ” personal choice” may i add as a staunch veggie i think people are forgetting the little fella involved. So dress it up as free range or cheap meat ( I used to eat both so i can comment) death is death and that is that! i do however love your blog and your meat free recipes. i also convert the dairy to dairy free. This does make it a bit more expensive ( i am thinking dairy free “cheese” for example. But You are a budget goddess and inspiration x
The Daily Mail is total bullshit. What annoys me is that it pretends to actually be a proper newspaper, when in reality it is just a nasty little rag, full of nasty little “writers” like Liz Jones and Jan Moir spouting their bigoted, racist,homophobic, judgemental views which then get taken as gospel by people too thick to know better. If you’ve got on the wrong side of the Daily Mail, you’re clearly doing something right. Keep it up.
Couldn’t agree more xx
Jack I’m now approaching 64 and it’s been a long time since I was in the dire straights you found yourself in, difference was I didn’t have a child to think of. I swore I would never be in that situation again, when I had my children I managed to buy a very modest house which meant we could never be homeless and I’ve had some ups and downs but have learned to be as sustainable as pos. you never forget poverty and are always on guard. My daughter is amazed because she jokingly calls me the queen of mean so when I told her that I’d found someone who I admired and who had ” taught granny to suck eggs”
Trust me I’m not easily impressed so keep doing what your doing. I especially love your vegetarian recipes as I grow my own food, though not a vegetarian. Of course we will choose our meat according to our needs and our conscience. The reality is you are helping. I once remarked when you were a tad critical of Jamie Oliver, but yesterday I caught one of his money savers, he was helping someone who buys half a lamb a week to avoid waste, think I’d be hard pressed to afford half a lamb a year these days. I learned nothing, I know how to wrap, freeze and label. I do learn from you, I’m glad the Daily Fail retracted and I thank you and wish you well. xx
Hard to believe that the Hate Mail is the second most popular paper in the country isn’t it. There must be a lot of people out there with warped ideologies. Mind you in WW2 it supported the Nazi’s !!
Mark, I have renamed the Daily Mail ‘Der Angriff’ for the BS I have heard they often peddle. I’ve never read it as I would not pay a penny for a hundred weight of it, nor that rag the Sun either.
Cheapest possible journalism, connection to reality not required.
Also, was this maybe posted on a Saturday or Sunday? In Germany, I have noticed the quality of “Spiegel Online” drop massively on the weekend, when the cheap crew takes over and no real journalist signs-off on what they publish. Sometimes they are in full “end of the world” mode on Sunday evening, and there is never a follow-up on Monday.
Isn’t it always curious that often the more privileged a person is, the more they sneer at someone who hasn’t had privileges and the advantages of wealth and a private education and connections, especially if the person they sneer at is talented and self made? Why is that? Does it show the privileged up for the often talentless, braying, Right wing, pompous gits we all seem to think they are anyway? Perhaps if the rich and privileged just counted their blessings and stopped attacking those of us who don’t have wealth and advantages and private educations, we’d all get along a bit better? Just a suggestion.
One of the few things I have the Daily Mail to thank for is that they brought this website to my attention.
The Daily Mail is a bit like the Westboro Baptist Church. If you do something that really pees them off, you know that you are leading a good life.
Liz Jones is probably one of the saddest women alive today. She tells people how to run their lives when her own is akin to a daily car crash. If she has chosen to single you out in one of her poorly written and frankly often incomprehensible articles, it simply means you are a success, something Liz finds impossible to achieve. Sadly she is nothing more than a bitter, dried up old husk!
You just do not get it – it doesn’t matter where you buy your dead animals or whether they are organic or not – they are all abused and tortured in the same slaughterhouses. Saddos like you make me sick – Liz Jones is worth 10 of you.
Thanks for your insight.
I think you are brilliant sticking up for what you believe in and not giving a toss what people like Liz Jones say about you, look at her failed life! You have to have a thick skin in this industry.