Morale through cooking

Hello,

this is what came to my mind:

  • Right now, you can theoretically live only on cooked meat, water, and vitamins(for health). There is no real reason to cook fancy meals, because realistically speaking they have to have similar nutritional values as our good old cooked meat. Advanced food cooking recipes are therefore not only more difficult to obtain and to do, but instead they give you (often) no advantage over plain foods, that are easily prepared within one or two steps. Scavenged food is often unhealthy, but since we have only one “health”-value, you can easily counter that by taking vitamins, and similar things.

So my proposal is:

In order to create an incentive for high-level cooking stuff, let the act of cooking itself give a morale bonus.
This bonus could be dependent on the variety and amount of resources used and/or the time that has to be spent cooking.
That way we don’t have to boost the morale value of advanced foods to ridiculous numbers, while at the same time encouraging advanced food cooking.

I know that idea will probably not move all the players to abandon their precious cooked meat, but it might help with the issue stated above.

One potential problem that comes to my mind is, that we have to exclude chemicals, meaning the “very advanced cooking” from this option, as those things already serve a purpose.

X smells delicious! = morale +
I love the smell of hot food cooking Mmmmmm.

Btw I just drink alcohol or mix drinks to get (food related) morale bonuses.
And cooked meat is 5% of my diet. 80% is sausage. The rest is alcohol or fluid sacs.

If they gave morale penalties to fluid sacs, I would laugh irl and then eat some chocolate (irl).

Betty Crocker or Chef Boyardee could possibly be traits that boost the morale bonus of cooking food?

personaly i like to make neat jerky because they do not spoil and are easy to make but eating it is ineffective and is better to make deluxe scrambled eggs (powder eggs do not spoil too) maybe it look like advenced cooking do not give anything but it allow create long term storage of food for years and good morale boosters (but junk food give it too)