I'm trawling blogs at work and ended up on a couple posts looking at logistics, particularly around food. Chatting briefly about them with a friend, she pointed out a lot of the problems surrounding real-world supply requirements for folks traveling are mooted in a game where food doesn't expire. And I wonder if this is worth gamifying in dungeon games.
A quick idea is to arbitrarily spoil food weekly. Regardless of when you bought or collected it, rations or their equivalent spoil once a week. Hardtack or Iron Rations can last longer - maybe two-weeks or a month. This probably works best with a game with a "weekly" calendar schedule, i.e., you advance the clock one-week at a time. You tend to see this in dungeon games where folks incorporate downtime rules.
Spoilage alone is not particularly interesting, so another change might be assigning a bonus to normal rations. If a game includes something like action points or inspiration, then a week's worth of rations might grant you an action point or a point of inspiration. If a game incorporates a cooking system, a ration might sub-in for an ingredient or act as a base to work off of. Meanwhile, Iron Rations would provide none of those benefits - they're the buy-and-forget-about-it option for players who don't want to deal with bookkeeping.
There's more to consider, around economics and encumbrance. But at the least, it would feel more meaningful than what happened the last time I ran a session of Break!!, where one party member just bought 100 of the cheapest food and said "We don't have to worry about this ever again."
