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.