It always seems to me that the role food plays in a game is always a little underwhelming. I am primarily referring to survival games where food consumption is a requirement rather than a boon.

In these types of games players generally have to cultivate the proper raw materials, build the proper processing objects and learn the particular recipies... after going through all this trouble the player obtains a piece of food that let's them continue playing without starving... often, there will be hundreds of recipies that can be learned, dozens of crops that can be cultivated, animals can be turned into meat to make ingredients... occasionally a food item will have an added benefit, perhaps it will make you move faster or something. In almost all cases though, I think players generally look through their available food sources, find a couple of particular recipes that is are good quality and easily reproducible then funnel all their farming/gathering/hunting efforts towards maximizing production of that small sub set of food. Then, after playing for awhile, looking at their characters eating habits you'll end up finding that despite the fact that the game boasts X number of recipes the characters diet consists of only one or two recipes being used repeatedly.

I want to outline a method to make food preparation to be less mechanical and more dynamic.... so I began to think about all the reasons that I eat/drink a wider variety of food then my in game counter parts... There are really two or maybe three factors. 1) Personal taste, I prefer some foods over others (but I don't want to eat the same thing constantly), 2) I need to keep my meals nutritionally balanced and 3) How much the food costs is a factor.

So my thoughts where something along these lines...
Each food can be given a flavor vector... this is a vector of five percentages representing a flavor: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, Spicy.
Raw materials would have this flavor vector and when crafting a new recipe the final flavor is the normalized sum of the ingredients. When a character is created a personal favorite flavor vector is generated (either randomly or though a questionnaire. When eating a food we plot two points in five dimensional space and calculate the distance between them. The large the distance, the less the character enjoys the meal, therefore the less benefit the character gains from eating it. If the distance is too great the player "can't stomach" the food and won't even be able to eat it. In addition, each time a player eats something their personal favorite flavor is adjusted to discourage repeated eating of the same flavor. Depending on flavor enjoyment thresholds the characters preference for the flavor can be converted to a scale such as "Can't stomach it", "Doesn't like it", "Indifferent", "Likes it", "Loves it".. where an efficiency coefficient is applied to each level (0%,25%,50%,75%,100%).

So if a player loves sweet things and eats a cake that is mostly sweet their preference for sweet things is decreased and their preference for some other flavor is increased (Either chosen randomly among the remain flavors or based on the consumed flavor).

Once the base food preference is determined (Distance favorite flavor to actual flavor) a chief quality modifier can be applied (good chiefs artificially reduce the distance regardless of flavor preference... not to the point that a stellar chief can make anything good permanently, but more so that a good chief can cook a flavor that is normally not edible, but because it was cooked so well the character can manage to swallow it. Or if the flavor was on the verge of being Indifferent/Likes it it gets pushed into the likes it threshold.
So, this can get players to start rotating their diet more... but it is still a bit forced and players may find some meal loop. I.E: Eat cake until you don't start prefering spicy things over sweet things, eat spicy things until you start to like sweet things again, rinse repeat.

So the second part can be the nutritional aspect of the food... this is where I am running into issues.
I am considering giving the food a nutritional vector as well... simplify the composition of food into a set of elements... Calcium, protein, fiber, Liptic Acid, etc... then give each element a role... calcium makes bones strong so eating it improves Max HP... or reduces chances falling damage. Liptic acid is used in cell regrowth so it could relate to the amount of HP regen the food provides. Protein could Increase STR. Fiber would increase the amount of fullness a food provides (it would require eating less high fiber foods to become full than low fiber foods). Sugar could increase enery or movement points etc. Vitamins could increase MP or some sort of mental stat.
At the same time, the character would maintain a vector indicating the quantity of each element within their system. As time passes the quantity decreases and the benifits only apply when an element is above a minimum required threshold... going over a maximum allowed threshold could start causing debuffs... this would turn food into a balancing act.

Players would have to cultivate/cook foods based on which nutritional elements are dipping to low/growing to large and how much they enjoy the meal.

Other items that might be interesting... perhaps the flavor vector could contain texture preferences... Smooth/Crunchy... moist/dry etc. Perhaps either the flavors or the nutritional elements could be replaced by elements such as "Meaty", "Fishy", "Fruity", "Veggy"

Thoughts? Ideas? Improvements? Roadblocks? issues? Etc?