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[OneRaven]

The cooking system isn't perfect right now, and it seems from the dev list that it's waiting for a total overhaul, so I have a simple suggestion to fix the most annoying thing about cooking (to me, of course). I use "simple" in the theoretical sense, because I have no idea how complex the code for cooking actually is, but it's a simple concept: Don't allow the same ingredient to be chosen twice for a single meal. Every meal is made of four different types of food. You wouldn't have plump helmets x4, or 3 bags of sugar. You could still get nonsense meals, like 1x ale, 1x wine, and 1x syrup, but it would stop my dwarves from constantly making plump helmet roasts out of nothing but plump helmets, just because that barrel is closest to the kitchen. 

(I keep mix food off so that I can easily sort and export foods)

[Warlord255]

I concur with this statement.

[neek]

Third'd.

[Dwaref]

my problem with cooking is that all you need is a cook for your export economy, even if everything you do is made from plump helmets and kitten tallow.

it's easy to change the MODVALUE of GCS so you don't get a lot of free cash with every kobold you kill, but nerfing food is near impossible! i just simply never export food, just as how i never manufacture crossbows.

[OneRaven]

I mainly export seeds, because while I brew aboveground plants I almost never farm outside.

[Pilsu]

Traders probably won't buy stew forever

Seems like wasted effort to add something like this if cooking will inevitably get a complete overhaul

[OneRaven]

Well, that depends on how soon the overhaul will come, doesn't it?

[Starver]

Traders probably won't buy stew forever

This, of course, could change if a trading overhaul (which I haven't looked to see if specifically mentioned, but might fit into the World Economy chatting that I've seen) makes it so that traders actually reduce the premium on your most prolific goods (whether that be mugs or stew or mechanisms).  As a modifier like the "requested goods" going for ~200%, but for 75%, 50% or whatever.

So, flood the market and, unless the 'next civilisation on' in the trading circuit[1] has a continuing requirement for tallow biscuits, bone bolts or caged kittens, you get less return on them.  To the extent that the value dips to trivial amounts unless you moderate it, perhaps switching to idols, instruments, or whatever to keep things fresh, but still able to flood the market with various non-perishable/non-comsunamle goods, at least, in the long-term.

[1] Noting that a proper economy must have traders actually following a circuitous/reciprocating trade-route, behind the scenes, and their attitudes to goods being bought and sold at your stop being affected by the requirements at stops they make preceding and following yours.  Or a reasonable facsimile of such behind-the-scenes processing based upon a bit of memory.  And as traders cannot, unlike Santa Claus, be everywhere in the world (or area) at once during the same autumnal trading period, and the route may adjust anyway as mountainhomes and human/elven settlements are added and removed from their roaming itinary (for various reasons), it wouldn't be quite the same as now...

[Granite26]

Well, that, and they'll be smart enough to know that stew won't last in the back of a wagon

[G-Flex]

Trading prepared meals to caravans simply shouldn't be feasible to begin with, unless it's specially-preserved, of course.

I know I've said this before, but cooking has two major problems associated with it:

• It's all profit, and a lot of it. The raw materials you're using, after all, are renewable and very easy to grow, constantly. You aren't dealing with anything that's expensive or limited in the first place, like you do with most other industries.
• Other industries tend to produce a single unit of a finished good at a time, maybe three if you're lucky. However, a single "Prepare Lavish Meal" action can produce dozens.

In other words, imagine if you could build a low-maintenance obsidian-making machine with no danger and little work or design associated with it, and could then tell your stonecrafting dwarf to make 45 rock crafts at once out of the stuff, regularly. That's what cooking is like right now.