Food writer and activist Jack Monroe is known for her no-nonsense approach to cooking, her commitment to poverty issues, and her mischievous sense of humour. The latter firmly on display today as she scoots into the theatre with a plate of cakes stolen from the author’s tent.

Monroe begins the reading from her latest cookbook, Tin Can Cook, seated but then decides to stand to make herself more comfortable. Not that it seems to work as she is clearly awkward doing it. She makes of a joke of it though and the reading itself is still engaging starkly highlighting the hunger poverty in the UK as well as illustrating our curious relationship with tinned food  – while much tinned food is looked down upon, tins of caviar are collector’s items in foodie circles.

Once the reading is over host, Heather Parry, probes into what motivated Monroe to write this particular cookbook. She explains that while she has previously written books for people with very little, this book is for people with nothing surviving from food banks. The most impressive thing is when she explains that to make the recipe book as available as possible she started a crowdfunding campaign to have it sent out to as many food banks as possible so they could then photocopy it and hand it out to people.

Another motivation is evidently to overturn class assumptions around food, particularly the idea that certain foods should be ring-fenced for only the select few. The inclusion of her own budget beurre blanc sauce, something that is seen as particularly ‘highfalutin’, being emblematic of this approach.

There is time for a few questions at the end including one on why although recipe book sales are up, actual cooking in the home is down and what can be done to reverse the trend? Monroe compellingly argues the why comes out of being force-fed marketing from the ready meal industry over the last couple of decades as the cheaper, more convenient alternative. She also argues how to change comes through teaching people to cook “very simple meals and expanding that into a small, expanding repertoire.”

For an event that had such serious points to make about food poverty, this was a surprisingly buoyant and humorous talk with a message that you don’t need expensive ingredients to make great food.