the more survival games and mods i play the more surprised i become that i've still only ever run into one game (or technically two or three i suppose if you count its successor/sorta-clone + 3D revamp) that does survival food mechanics in an engaging way, imo, a game called Haven and Hearth. a lot of survival games and modders tend to focus on making food give you short-term buffs, or making food more complicated to produce, but that kinda fails to motivate me when the reward for eating is just being able to run at normal speed and not losing HP for a few more minutes.
H&H hails from the survival subgenre of super hardcore waiting and tedium simulators, and is also an MMO, and i'd probably hate playing it these days, but H&H manages to incentivize food, farming, processing, and cooking in an interesting way by making food tied to your RPG stat gains - with each food giving different permanent benefits, and the more complex processing required and the more complex the recipe, the better. it also perhaps helps that your hunger meter doesn't deplete in 5 minutes or less of ingame action, which aside from being convenient also serves to sort of gate off the rate at which you progress in stats via food because eating too much past your satiation limit gives you debuffs. idk, it's an interesting dynamic.
of course, this does need to be backed up by a stat system that gives you genuinely interesting things to do with your stats. in H&H, food modifies your "innate" Attribute stats, which are the basis for a wide variety of things:
• your physical prowess in the game world
• the quality of crafted goods
• the rate at which you can research, incrementing learned Skills and unlocking new Skills (and the industrial-social tech tree)
• your competence in social mechanics.
examples of the latter: maintaining a village requires a resource called Authority which recharges based on your stats. stats increase your ability to detect clues left by thieves from enemy settlements and gain a sort of casus belli on them that allows you to go raid them without "tresspassing" and leaving behind criminal clue tokens yourself. etc. anyway, just thinking aloud i suppose.