meal-preparing?

[ohmyrichard]

Hi, everyone! Please do me a favour and tell me whether I can replace "preparing meals" in the following sentence with "meal-preparing"?

The duties of the job include baby-sitting, house-cleaning, and preparing meals.

I googled "meal-preparing" but found that in most cases "meal preparation" is used. But when I was leafing through the webpages of seach results patiently, I got one entry entitiled "Meal-Preparing Tips for Parents of ADD / ADHD Kids: Snack In ...".
Still, in this case, "meal-preparing" is used as a modifier, not a noun. So it may be incorrect to use this example to prove that we can use "meal-preparing" to substitute "preparing meals" in the above sentence.

Please help me out!
Thanks.
Richard

[Anglika]

Not generally. As you surmise, it can be used in specific contexts [job descriptions for housekeepers, for instance].

[ohmyrichard]

Not generally. As you surmise, it can be used in specific contexts [job descriptions for housekeepers, for instance].

In the case of job descriptions, then can "meal-preparing" be used as a noun? It seems not, right? Is it always used before noun?
Thanks.
Richard

[RonBee]

Prefer meal preparation. Say:

The duties of the job include baby-sitting, house-cleaning, and meal preparation.

[ohmyrichard]

Prefer meal preparation. Say:

The duties of the job include baby-sitting, house-cleaning, and meal preparation.

Thanks, RonBee. This is really something very interesting. Actually the sentence is taken from The New St. Martin's Hangbook, compiled by Andrea Lunsford, an Ohio State University professor and Robert Connors, a University-of-New-Hampshire professor in 1999. On p.263, the original sentence reads, "The duties of the job include baby-sitting, house-cleaning and preparation of meals." And the compilers suggest that "preparation of meals" be changed to "preparing meals" to make the structures go parallel to each others and they haven't given any other corrections. This afternoon,when my student asked whether "meal-preparing" can be used instead, my first response was "No", because I have never seen it used that way. But I was not sure of it. Then I googled it and still got it unsolved. That is why I came here for your help. You think that "meal preparation" is the best choice. What puzzles me now is: Are those two professors wrong there? But they are also native speakers of English!
Please enlighten me! English sometimes is so terrible to me a non-native!
Thanks.
Richard

[RonBee]

The construction is parallel. The other way (IMO) is:

The duties of the job include taking care of the baby, cleaning house, and preparing meals.

Do you see the difference between the two sentences?

[ohmyrichard]

The construction is parallel. The other way (IMO) is:

The duties of the job include taking care of the baby, cleaning house, and preparing meals.

Do you see the difference between the two sentences?

So we just make "taking care of the baby", "cleaning the house" and "preparing meals" compact and get "baby-sitting", "house-cleaning" and "meal preparation" correspondingly. We may have these two sets of construction for these same ideas, but we are not allowed to mix these items at will. Am I right?
Thanks.
Richard