Week 1: Why prepare at all

The case for preparation, made with time-use figures rather than assertion, and the thesis the semester is built to test.

22 February 2027

Open the slides

The claim

A meal is decided before it is cooked. Selection, storage, temperature, cutting and sequence determine what arrives at the pan; the stove only reveals a decision already made. This course spends weeks 1 through 10 on that decision. Weeks 11 and 12 apply heat, and only to test it: the same dishes, cooked the same way, from material that was prepared differently in the weeks before.

What the data show

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, in its 2014 Eating and Health Module, put average daily time on food preparation, serving and cleanup at 37 minutes for Americans aged 18 and over. A separate USDA Economic Research Service analysis, tracking the narrower activity of preparation alone, found it rose from 23.4 minutes a day in 2004–07 to 27.5 minutes in 2014–17 — an 18 percent increase — while the share of people who prepared food on a given day rose from 47 to 54 percent over the same period. Feeding oneself is not a shrinking task; it is, on the aggregate figures, a slightly growing one.

Monsivais, Aggarwal and Drewnowski surveyed 1,319 adults in 2008–09 and grouped them by daily time spent on food preparation and cleanup: under one hour, one to two hours, and over two hours. The groups that spent more time preparing food reported eating more fruit and vegetables; the group that spent the least time reported more reliance on convenience food and more frequent eating out. The study does not show that time causes the difference — people who prioritise convenience may simply do both things, spend less time and eat more convenience food, for the same underlying reason — but the association between preparation time and diet quality is the one this course treats as worth taking seriously.

None of this is a claim about money. A defensible figure for the cost difference between eating out and preparing at home did not turn up a source better than marketing copy, so the course does not make that claim; the time figures above stand on their own.

Why the course is a bet on preparation

Time is a constraint here, not the subject — this is not a course about doing things faster. The bet is narrower: that the 10 weeks before the stove determine more of the outcome than the time spent at the stove itself, and that this is checkable. Weeks 11 and 12 check it directly, by holding the cooking constant and varying only what happened before.

Outline

Teaching team