Being depressed is an important part of post-apocalyptic survival.
Let’s not mistake the mood effects of food for being pivotal. After all, there are other ways to improve your mood, like music and reading and drugs/alcohol. And being in a bad mood isn’t the end of the world. The complaint is that right now there’s a semi-complex cooking system and no actual incentive to use it. Cooking anything other than the very basic is basically a huge waste of time. Implementing systems which penalize repetitive eating only serves to incentivize resource collection, which is sort of the name of the game. As long as you’re collecting food and getting some food variety, you’re good in terms of mood. The nutrition of stuff doesn’t change - food will keep you alive and repeatedly eating cold canned corn won’t depress you to the point of suicide. It’s just one more factor to consider, and one more way to improve your character’s performance by investing in the cooking skill - even if just a little bit.
On a related note, I really feel like there should be a temporary mood bonus to any food that is eaten when you are very hungry, and diminishing returns on food eaten when not hungry at all. This should apply to drinks and thirst as well. The difference between the experience of eating a meal while starving and the same meal while satisfied, is like night and day.
