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.

Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.

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 is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.

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.

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.

I wear Doc Martens leather boots, so I'm not a vegan. I am a vague-one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not organised, and I don't cope well with deadlines, structure and routine. I'm chaotic. Always have been.

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.

We need to aim to get rid of food banks altogether, and replace charitable intervention with a fairer, more equal society.

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.

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.

A startling confession for a food writer: all through high school, I struggled with a severe eating disorder.

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.

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.

It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator.

I'm not the spring chicken everyone wants. I've got a debilitating illness. The brave face is 'I'm busy with work' but I've sort of chucked myself on the scrapheap. That's why I'm single. I've resigned myself to being a difficult woman.

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.

In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.

But it's a disgrace that food banks are needed in the first place, patching up the holes left by an inefficient and downright barbaric attack on the meagre safety net of what remains of a notion of 'social security'.

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.

Working 90 hours a week is easily racked up when you're self-employed and rely on portable tech to do your work; your train journeys, toilet breaks, leisurely walks, bedtime, can all become 'working hours'. Reclaim them.

It's definitely not the case that every child living in poverty is eligible for free school lunches.

I was working with the fire service in a job that should have been a job for life, with career progression, with a pension and promotion, and within a year I was sleeping on a sofa under a section 21 notice being evicted from my home and not eating or four days.

My pregnancy changed my relationship with my body because I went from despising it to marvelling at what it can do.

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.

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.

The last time I celebrated a special occasion, I hashed together a paella with some chicken, some frozen veg, long-grain rice, chilli and a shake of turmeric for colour - and it didn't disappoint.

At 11, following comprehensive psychiatric and cognitive assessments, an educational psychiatrist appointed by my high school recommended that I attend a school for 'gifted and talented' children.

Don't say things about people that aren't true... because there are consequences for that.

Many families teeter on the edges, not qualifying for the little support on offer, unwilling to seek it for fear of drawing attention to a household barely holding the pieces together, or hit by unexpected bills.

I left home at 18, I thought I knew everything. It was fun for a while and then it wasn't fun any more.

During my time at Essex county fire and rescue service, barely a shift went by without receiving a call from an elderly person who had fallen in their home, or from their concerned neighbour or carer.

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.

I'm very careful with the money I have, I pay myself the living wage, and I try to save the rest, because if life has taught me one thing it's that you never know what is around the corner.

I put my son's nutritional needs first, and existed on pasta and thin air more times than I would dare to admit.

You don't see very many Irish-Cypriot pop-up restaurants kicking about!

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.

My bark is far, far worse than my bite.

I think as much as people moan at things like award ceremonies, it gives people role models. It provides real positive reinforcement that you can be who you are and still massively achieve.

When I was born my parents lived in a flat so small that it now legally can't be rented out as a dwelling.

I've had success, but I'm still haunted by the fear of being hungry. Once you've lived it it never leaves you.

Party politics are quite upsetting. I've been a member of the Labour party, the Green party, the Women's Equality Party, the National Health Action Party and now I'm not a member of any.

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.

I never learned to cook, so I've got no rules. I'll put things together just because I think they belong together.