Chapter 31 — Exercises

Three tiers. 🔄 retrieval; 🪞 reflection. ⚠️ Most of these require a real week and a real fridge.**

Tier 1 — Recall and Comprehension

R1. ⚠️ Give the four failure modes. What do all four have in common?

R2. ⚠️ Which three of Kwabena's four failures were predictable on Sunday? Explain each.

R3. What does §31.1 concede about the evidence for meal planning? ⚠️ What is planning's actual mechanism, and which chapter supports it better?

R4. ⚠️ Give the six things to record when mapping a week, and the five capacity classes.

R5. ⚠️ State the difference between planning forwards and backwards. What comes first, and what comes last?

R6. ⚠️ What are the five properties of a repertoire meal? How many should you have, and how do you add one?

R7. ⚠️ Why does the chapter say rotation is not failure?

R8. ⚠️ Give the five rules for building a shopping list. Which purchase category does §31.6 call the most reliable waste source?

R9. ⚠️ Give four benefits and five costs of batch cooking. Which cost kills it?

R10. ⚠️ Name the six component types, and the two rules that make the system work.

R11. ⚠️ Name five things that freeze badly and four practical freezer rules.

R12. ⚠️ Give the five properties of a bad-night plan. What does it convert a plan failure into?

R13. What is a "planned-over"? ⚠️ Why is transformation better than repetition?

R14. ⚠️ Give the seven waste sources and their planning fixes. What is the fresh/frozen rule?

R15. ⚠️ Which meals does §31.12b say nobody plans, and why does that matter?

R16. ⚠️ What is the short-order cook problem, and what are the four fixes for a household?

R17. ⚠️ Give §31.14's seven rows. What does the chapter say to someone in the right-hand column?

R18. ⚠️ Recite the nine slots.

R19. ⚠️ Which piece of equipment does the chapter call the single highest-impact item, and why?

R20. ⚠️ What is the largest single number in §31's costing, and which meal does it come from?

Tier 2 — Application

A1. 🔄 Diagnose the plan. Someone plans: Mon Thai curry (new), Tue Moroccan tagine (new), Wed sushi bowls (new), Thu leftovers, Fri roast, Sat pasta, Sun soup.

a) ⚠️ Which failure modes are present? b) Rewrite it using §31.4's backwards method, assuming: Wednesday is a late finish, Friday they're out, Saturday is free. c) ⚠️ What did you not have to change?

A2. Map a real week. ⚠️ Do §31.3 for next week, properly.

a) How many HIGH nights do you have? b) ⚠️ How many did you assume you had before you counted? c) Where does your ZERO night fall?

A3. ⚠️ Build the components. Design one Sunday session producing six components, and then five dinners from them.

⚠️ Then check: are any two dinners the same dinner? If so, redesign.

A4. Name your bad-night meal. ⚠️ Right now.

a) What is it? b) ⚠️ Is every ingredient shelf-stable or frozen? c) Is it under 15 minutes? d) ⚠️ Would you genuinely be content eating it? (If not, pick again — a punishment meal doesn't get eaten.)

A5. ⚠️ The orphan audit. Open your fridge.

a) List every half-used ingredient. b) ⚠️ For each: which recipe created it, and was that recipe shared with any other meal that week? c) Design a two-meal pair that would have used it up.

A6. ⚠️ The lunch calculation.

a) How many lunches do you buy per week? At what cost? b) ⚠️ Annualize it. c) What would replace it, from §31.12b? d) ⚠️ What's the actual barrier — money, time, or the container?

Tier 3 — Analysis and Synthesis

S1. ⚠️ Plans, not people. §31.2 argues all four failure modes are properties of the plan.

a) ⚠️ Is that always true? Construct a genuine discipline failure that isn't a plan failure. b) Why does the reframing matter practically? c) ⚠️ Where else in this book has a personal failing turned out to be a structural one? (Chapters 19, 21, 24 and 29 all have one.)

S2. The evidence problem. §31.16 says this chapter is "closer to craft than to science."

a) ⚠️ Is that an acceptable thing for a textbook to say? b) Design a trial that would test the components approach. ⚠️ What's your outcome, and why is it hard? c) ⚠️ Should practical chapters be held to the same evidential standard as Part IV? Argue both.

S3. ⚠️ Palatability decay. §31.7 calls it the reason batch cooking fails.

a) Why is it almost never mentioned in batch-cooking advice? b) ⚠️ Does the components approach genuinely solve it, or defer it? c) What would you measure to find out?

S4. The variety question. §31.10 says variety is a value, not a nutritional requirement above a low floor.

a) ⚠️ Where is that floor? Use Part III and Chapter 27 to set it. b) Is the chapter right that expected novelty is recent and media-driven? c) ⚠️ What does a person lose by eating a fifteen-meal rotation? Is that loss nutritional?

S5. ⚠️ The split with Chapter 32. §31.14 states the limit explicitly.

a) ⚠️ Is drawing that line honest, or is it abandoning the harder readers? b) Which parts of this chapter DO transfer to the right-hand column? Be specific. c) ⚠️ Write the two-sentence version of this chapter for someone with no freezer and no slack.

S6. 🔄 ⚠️ The system, tested. Run §31.15's nine slots for two weeks.

a) How many nights went as planned, each week? b) ⚠️ Which slot did you skip? (Most people skip the fridge audit or the bad-night meal.) c) ⚠️ What broke, and was it a plan property or a person property?

🪞 Reflection

M1. ⚠️ When a meal plan of yours has failed, what did you conclude about yourself? Was it accurate?

M2. ⚠️ How many meals can you genuinely cook without a recipe? Count them. Is it more or fewer than you'd have said?

M3. §31.10 says the same breakfast most days is a feature. ⚠️ Does that sit comfortably? What are you actually getting from variety?

M4. ⚠️ §31.13b's short-order cook. In your household, who plans, who shops and who cooks? Has that ever been discussed?

M5. 🔄 ⚠️ §31.14 says this chapter would produce "a sense of failure" for someone in the right-hand column. Have you ever been given advice that assumed resources you didn't have? How did it land?