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[Carpecanum]

I have a plethora of stone pots and the brewer uses them but I have 200+ food items in need of storage and the stone pots are never used.  Is there a standing command I need to turn off or on? 

[Ulfarr]

Food is storable in pots. There is one standing order that controls "whether dwarves will move food to a stockpile" (o-f) but I don't think there is a use pot/barrels one.

It's possible that the food bugged out, no idea why but I had it happen a few times where my dwarves would ignore the meal in the kitchen only for it to start rotting at which point they would start to move it to the refuse stockpiles.

[PatrikLundell]

- Stockpiles have a "use pot/barrel" setting that's on as default for food stockpiles, but not e.g. animal ones (which is the type you get if you just start with a default type stockpile).
- Stockpile links can mess things up when set to take from links only (and not having a barrel/pot stockpile as a source).
- Burrows can lock items out of access.
- Cut paths can block access to items.
- Hauling is a low priority job category (apart from hauling to the trade depot), which means other jobs may take priority over them (including other hauling jobs, like old bones [and teeth] from the caverns, which dorfs love to take rather than move fresh meat from the butcher to a stockpile).
- It seems completely full stockpiles won't get a barrel/pot/bin hauled to it as a free space is needed for the container.

This list is probably not complete...

[Loci]

One addition to PatrikLundell's list:

"Reserved Barrels" is a global setting that reserves barrels/pots for workshop jobs (like brewing), making them unavailable for use in stockpiles. New players tend to think its a local stockpile setting that controls the minimum number of barrels/pots in that stockpile and set it to a high value, causing problems like those you described.

[anewaname]

- It seems completely full stockpiles won't get a barrel/pot/bin hauled to it as a free space is needed for the container.

When there is an item blocking the stockpile tile, the container will still be assigned to the stockpile (you'll see the stockpile # added to the container's description, even if the container is far away), and items will be put in it, then it will be hauled to the stockpile and put in the same tile as the item.

If you didn't find a solution in what was already posted, to help you determine what is happening, you can check your 'j'obs menu. If you have any "store item in pot/barrel" jobs, hit 'j' again to see what items are being stored in that job.

It is like this... it is easy to have too much un-stockpiled food. You do some trading and butchering and suddenly have 400 food items that the dwarfs want to haul. There will be a rush of movement as many individual items are brought to the stockpiles, then all the movement will stop and you will wonder why they are not filling those barrels/pots. The problem is that each food stockpile will only have one "working" container, and only one dwarf will work it. He will do the work efficiently, but slowly, taking a couple of months to fill 30 containers. If this describes what you have been seeing, you can speed up the container-packing by creating more food stockpiles (for each stockpile, allow containers and only allow meat/fish/cheese/plant/leaves/cooked foods, the foods that can rot), then there will be more dwarfs working barrels and it will get done faster. Having four 20 tile stockpiles can be better than having one 100 tile stockpile.

[Carpecanum]

I had a big problem with rotting food (in the kitchen) for a while.  I now stop food production every couple of months until everything is cleaned out.  I prefer heavily forested embarks so I suppose i could just make more barrels (which DO show up in my food pile). 
Thank you for the tips.  I will spend the next few days playing with it.  My current set-up uses a series of 7x7 rooms for everything and just connect multiple rooms for larger areas.  Instead of keeping my current enormous stockpile I will break it up into 3 piles of 3 7x7 rooms and again with 9 7x7 piles.