Chapter 31 — Self-Check Quiz

20 questions. Answers with explanations at the end. Aim for 16+.

Questions

1. The four failure modes of meal plans are all:

• a) Failures of discipline
• b) Properties of the plan, not the person
• c) Caused by lack of cooking skill
• d) Financial

2. Kwabena's Friday failed because:

• a) He was lazy
• b) The plan called for a new recipe — the highest-effort option — on the lowest-energy night
• c) The ingredients were unavailable
• d) He had no time at all

3. The evidence that meal planning improves diet quality is:

• a) Randomized and strong
• b) Observational and confounded — plausibly useful, weak causal evidence
• c) Non-existent
• d) Based on metabolic ward studies

4. Planning's actual mechanism is:

• a) Willpower training
• b) Changing what is in the house — which Chapter 22 supports better than the planning literature does
• c) Reducing calories directly
• d) Improving cooking skill

5. When mapping a week, you classify each night by:

• a) Cuisine
• b) Capacity — high, medium, low, zero, or out
• c) Nutritional target
• d) Cost

6. Planning "backwards" means:

• a) Cooking dinner before lunch
• b) Mapping the week's capacity first, assigning meal TYPES to slots, and choosing food last
• c) Shopping before planning
• d) Working from the freezer outwards

7. A repertoire meal is one you:

• a) Found in a magazine this week
• b) Can cook without a recipe, tired, with substitutions, in a time you can predict accurately
• c) Cook once a year
• d) Have the exact ingredients for

8. The chapter's target repertoire size is roughly:

• a) 3–5 meals
• b) 10–15 meals
• c) 50 meals
• d) Unlimited

9. The shopping list matters because:

• a) It saves time in the shop
• b) It is what converts intention into food in the house — a plan without a list is a wish
• c) It reduces prices
• d) It replaces planning

10. Which purchase category does §31.6 call the most reliable waste source?

• a) Frozen vegetables
• b) Aspirational purchases bought "just in case"
• c) Tinned goods
• d) Own-brand staples

11. The cost of batch cooking that most often kills it is:

• a) Time
• b) Palatability decay — the same dish four nights running fails and the rest is binned
• c) Container cost
• d) Electricity

12. The fix for palatability decay is:

• a) Bigger batches
• b) Batch COMPONENTS, not complete meals
• c) More freezer space
• d) Stronger seasoning

13. Components should be:

• a) Fully seasoned and combined at the point of cooking
• b) Unseasoned or lightly seasoned, stored separately, and seasoned at assembly
• c) Frozen immediately
• d) Cooked to order

14. You may freeze food:

• a) Only on the day it is bought
• b) Up to its use-by date, which resets the clock
• c) Only if it has never been refrigerated
• d) Never, once opened

15. A bad-night plan must be:

• a) Nutritionally optimal
• b) Decided in advance, shelf-stable or frozen, under 15 minutes, and genuinely acceptable to you
• c) A takeaway
• d) Different every week

16. The bad-night plan works by:

• a) Improving nutrition on that night specifically
• b) Converting a plan failure into a plan feature
• c) Saving time
• d) Reducing calories

17. The fresh/frozen rule is:

• a) Buy everything fresh
• b) Fresh produce for the first half of the week, frozen and tinned for the second
• c) Freeze everything on arrival
• d) Never buy frozen

18. The largest single sum in §31's costing comes from:

• a) Reduced food waste
• b) Replacing bought lunches with planned-overs — £1,500–2,200 a year
• c) Buying own-brand
• d) Cooking more from scratch

19. The commonest reason a planning system collapses in a family is:

• a) Lack of recipes
• b) The short-order cook — producing a different meal per person
• c) Insufficient equipment
• d) Cost

20. This chapter is explicitly NOT written for households whose binding constraints are:

• a) Preference and taste
• b) Money, unpredictable hours, a shared kitchen, no freezer, or inaccessible shops
• c) Family size
• d) Dietary restrictions

Answers

1. b) Properties of the plan. ⚠️ A plan that assumes uniform capacity, front-loads novelty, has no slack and shares no ingredients will fail for almost anybody. Which is good news, because plans are much easier to change than people. §31.2.

2. b) A new recipe on the lowest-energy night. ⚠️ Three of his four failures were predictable on Sunday — the late meeting was in his calendar, Thursday failed because Wednesday did, and Friday put the highest-effort option on the worst night. None was a discipline problem. §31 hook, §31.2.

3. b) Observational and confounded. ⚠️ People who plan differ from people who don't in income, education, time, household structure and cooking confidence — Chapter 2 §2.3, again. §31.1.

4. b) Changing what is in the house. ⚠️ Which is Chapter 22's argument arriving in a kitchen, and it is better supported than the planning literature itself. The plan is a delivery mechanism for the list; the list is the intervention. §31.1, §31.6.

5. b) Capacity. ⚠️ Most weeks contain one or two HIGH nights, three MEDIUM, one or two LOW and one ZERO. "A plan with seven medium-to-high nights in it is not a plan. It is a wish with days attached." §31.3.

6. b) Capacity first, type second, food last. ⚠️ The constraint comes first and the food comes last — which feels backwards to anyone who enjoys cooking, and is the whole point. Kwabena's replanned week eliminated two failure modes by rearrangement alone, with the same amount of cooking. §31.4.

7. b) Without a recipe, tired, with substitutions, predictably timed. ⚠️ "A new recipe is a hobby. A repertoire is a system." §31.5.

8. b) 10–15. ⚠️ One new recipe a week, on a high-capacity night, cooked three or four times before it counts — about twelve additions a year, which is plenty. And most cuisines historically run on a small rotating repertoire: "rotation is not failure; it is how eating has always worked." §31.5.

9. b) It converts intention into food in the house. ⚠️ Shopping without a list produces more unplanned purchases, skewed heavily toward Group 4; online ordering removes the aisle and is one of the few genuinely effective structural interventions available to an individual. §31.6.

10. b) Aspirational purchases. ⚠️ Kwabena's spinach, bought "because it's good to have," went in the bin. §31.6.

11. b) Palatability decay. ⚠️ The intuitive fix — one big batch of one thing — maximizes the problem. And it is almost never mentioned in batch-cooking advice. §31.7.

12. b) Components, not complete meals. ⚠️ A grain, a protein, a roasted vegetable tray, a quick vegetable, a sauce, a flavour hit. Four components make far more than four meals, and the combinatorics defeat decay because no two dinners are the same dinner. §31.8.

13. b) Unseasoned, separate, seasoned at assembly. ⚠️ "A chilli-and-cumin chickpea is a chickpea that can only go in one direction." And combined food degrades faster and cannot be recombined. §31.8.

14. b) Up to the use-by date. ⚠️ Chapter 30 §30.11b — the single most useful freezer fact, and not widely known. (Also: freeze in the portion you'll actually use, label and date everything, and keep a list on the door.) §31.9.

15. b) All of those. ⚠️ And it must be on the standing shopping list, and NOT eaten on good nights. A punishment meal doesn't get eaten. §31.11.

16. b) It converts a plan failure into a plan feature. ⚠️ The takeaway isn't the problem — the problem is that the takeaway means the plan "failed," and a failed plan gets abandoned (§31.2's third failure mode, and Chapter 10's all-or-nothing pattern). §31.11.

17. b) Fresh first half, frozen and tinned second. ⚠️ Nothing spoils, the late-week nights are the low-capacity ones anyway, and frozen vegetables are nutritionally comparable (Chapter 20 §20.15). §31.13.

18. b) Bought lunches — £1,500–2,200 a year. ⚠️ From the meal nobody plans. Breakfast, lunch and snacks are roughly two-thirds of eating occasions and are where Chapter 22 found Group 4 intake concentrated — and meal planning is almost always dinner planning. §31.12b.

19. b) The short-order cook. ⚠️ Producing a different meal per person converts one cooking event into three, permanently. The fixes: deconstructed meals · one meal with a guaranteed acceptable element · splitting planning, shopping and cooking as three explicit jobs · and a short agreed veto list. §31.13b.

20. b) Money, hours, kitchen, freezer, access. ⚠️ "If the right-hand column describes you, this chapter's advice is not wrong — it is addressed to someone else, and following it will mostly produce a sense of failure." Chapter 32 is written for that column deliberately, and it is a different problem, not a simplified version. §31.14.

Scoring

Three items worth checking regardless of score.

Question 12. ⚠️ Components rather than complete meals is the single most useful practical idea in the chapter.

Question 16. ⚠️ The bad-night plan is the recommendation I'd defend hardest, and it costs one decision.

Question 20. ⚠️ If this chapter's advice has ever made you feel inadequate rather than equipped, §31.14 is why — and Chapter 32 is next.