Food and rotting

[RideTheDivide]

I've been thinking lately about food - particularly meat.  Every clan I've been involved with has either had a cook or a "bucket o' food" that is filled with steaks and other stuff.  Its always been very jarring to have a chest full of steaks.  I mean - they would go bad very quickly.

If anything, I could see the food being roasted roots, and *smoked* meat since those should last.  Cheese and nuts also seem appropriate.  

I wonder what it would take to make foods have rot-times.  So uncooked meat would go bad within an hour or two, steaks and such might take a day or two, and smoked/salted meats would last much longer.  Fruits might take a couple of weeks to go bad and roots would last quite a while.  It just seems like it would add a whole new and interesting element to the food code.

[Praetorian]

Its a fine idea, but I think the present issue is more toward playability.  If you return from a hunt, put all your gathered meat and such aside, and don't wish to cook it all up -immediately-, it would spoil and be worthless.  You would be faced with everyone spending half their time cooking (since it does take awhile unless you just sit back and craft quickly without any form of emoted flavor toward it).  For that matter, some hunts take more than a few hours real life time.  Would the meat from the first half of the hunt be spoiled before they got back to their cook fires?  If food rotting at that rate was implemented I suspect the overall effect would be players would just buy their food, and rangers wouldn't have much of a market for their raw meat.  Sure it would make those who made cooking a profession more sought-out, but to have it rot in general across the board is a mistake.

Alternately, if food rotting -was- implemented, I would hope there would be shops of a sort, or cooking facilities where someone could like 'rent' a bag (similar to tailoring something), receive a ticket with a timeframe on when they can come pick up their cooked meat, and pay a minor premium for the service.  If you want it cooked a particular way, find a cook.  If you just want it cooked period and dont care about how, toss it to one of those shops.

[JollyGreenGiant]

Couple things come to mind.  The dry atmosphere probably retards decay significantly.  Also, there's the whole vnpc factor.  Stuff gets "eaten" by non-pcs, and "replaced" by non-pcs.  Even if that bucket of steaks from a  codewise standpoint looks identical to the way you left it, it's quite reasonable to assume that gamewise, it isn't.