Just to make cooking interesting, I thought up a way that people could serve infinate food recipes without having to hand the customer 10 items ontop of a bucket or something, and without a million different graphics. Make a pot and pot of food items. The pot is basically a bag (it holds things), however use the pot with a fire the graphic changes to pot with some liquid and chunks (pot of food). The handy thing would be, when you shift clicked the pot of food, your character automatically eats all the food in it changing the graphic back to just the pot. This would be a set up for alot of roleplay possibilities. I have an iron pot graphic in the metals and such section of my site (get there by clicking my homepage button and then clicking picture with metal items).
I would be worried about eating anything from anyone.....What if they overloaded it with a ton of food..I mean a TON...and you ate it, became stuffed to where you were sick and then died....or is that even possible?
Also would be a neat way to poison people by putting a yellow potion in it.
Accually ark, if you eat too much and get sick a bunch of times you will be completely empty again and not be able to work. You will have to accually eat more to do anything.
If it was a bag like item, you could see how much food was in it also. So you could ask for a smaller portion I guess (have the cook remove some food). They have a book about nutrition in the library if your character is interested in learning about food, unless its not there anymore.
It would probobly depend on your constitution how much health you see go down. Not everyone has the same health, if you have 2 health, it will only take 1 point loss to make it look half full. If you have 20, 1 will make it look like hardly any has been taken.