Week 1 Prep: Why prepare at all

Why week 1 carries no tutorial exercise: establishing the case for preparation is not itself a preparation decision, and the exercises begin once one exists to practise.

22 February 2027

A meal is decided before it is cooked, and week 1 is the one week that only argues this rather than practising it — there is no storage choice, cut or timing decision yet on the table for a tutorial to check.

Why there is no tutorial#

Weeks 2 through 10 each attach a hands-on exercise to a decision already in front of the student: a storage choice, a fat percentage, a safe-until time. Week 1 has not reached that point. It makes the case, from measured time-use data rather than assertion, that the decisions in the following nine weeks are worth a semester’s attention — argued in full in this week’s lecture — and an argument of that kind does not itself produce anything a calculator could compute. The tutorials begin next week, once vegetables give the course its first storage decision to practise.

The figure this week rests on#

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, reported via USDA’s Economic Research Service, put average daily time on food preparation, serving and clean-up at 37 minutes. That is the figure this course opens with; the fuller account, including the additional data this week’s lecture builds on top of it, sits there rather than being repeated here.