In -most- cases that I've seen, food that has already been smoked or dried, has some indication of that in their mdesc. I don't remember the exact sdescs but there are examples of simple strips of meat - they look kind of like their smoked version until you read the mdesc and see very clearly that these aren't the raw strips; they're the smoked strips.
I don't think there needs to be any redundancy by adding the same information into assess. I do think it'd be important for the staff to add a flag to anything that says it's smoked, but isn't decaying like smoked, so that it will behave appropriately.
Also I LOVE the twist to the foods that are skinned at the same time but don't go poof at the exact same time. It gives a player at least a chance at having a bite before the whole bag full goes poof.