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[Five chickens]

Also, what are some stockpiles you like to keep just outside your dining halls?  Thanks in advance.

Another question... is there any reason to make anything other than lavish meals, besides training?

[Mobbstar]

Stockpile settings have a special case for prepared meals.  Press U to toggle it.  Relatedly, beware that the food category contains lye and milk of lime.

I prefer to explicitly *not* have cup stockpiles, but instead let the cups linger directly upon the drink stockpile.

The cooking skill is trained even more quickly by rendering large amounts of fat.  Also, it is extremely unlikely to run out of ingredients for lavish meals but retain enough for simple meals.  Therefore, I'd argue all advantages of simple meals are negligible.

[Quietust]

The main advantage of making Lavish meals is that you'll end up with larger stacks, allowing you to fit more meals in a given amount of space (assuming you don't mess with minecarts or quantum stockpiling). It also tends to make the meals more valuable (since they have more ingredients), but it also results in your cooks getting less experience (since they only gain experience for each cooking job, not for each individual meal produced in the stack).

[Uthimienure]

To elaborate on Q#1 for stockpile with ONLY prepared food:
1. Make food stockpile
2. In s: Change settings, hit b for block all, then hit u for prepared food

[PatrikLundell]

Another advantage of Lavish meals is that they stretch the supply of favored ingredients in meals so there's a greater chance of some dorfs getting that need satisfied. However, you're entirely reliant on luck for that to happen unless you use DFHackery to control meal production.
I'm not sure, but the latest change to meal satisfaction seems to take quality into account as well, so it might also take value into consideration. If that's the case, a Lavish meal could be better at satisfaction than a simple one of equal quality.

[Naia]

It's also a good idea to avoid any barrels in stockpiles for prepared meals. The meals will be just fine stored on the ground, and multiple dwarfs can access the same stack at the same time.


As for others stockpiles. I like to keep my cooking and brewing right next to the dining hall, and raw food/plants next to that, ( but further away ) to minimize the logistics involved.
The prepared meals are stored just inside the entrance of the dining hall, so 95% of the times a dwarf get hungry, they will look for the closest food item, which will be the prepared meals.

[Garfunkel]

Can't barrels hold multiple stacks of prepared meals? In other words, I can fit more meals in my stockpile at the dining hall if I use barrels. If I'm wrong, that'll change my whole dining area layout

[Uthimienure]

Yes, barrels hold lots of stacks.  I use barrels.  I think Naia was referring to a barrel being "locked" similarly to a bin when a dwarf is accessing it.  If you make your prep'd meal stockpile a decent size for your population so you have enough barrels to cover the rate the dwarfs access them this shouldn't be a problem.

[Quietust]

I suppose you can disregard my comment about stack size - I only play older versions of DF, and I'm still used to barrels only being able to hold 10 items apiece and huge stacks of 100+ prepared meals not fitting inside them at all.

[Five chickens]

Thanks again for these answers... and the ones yet to come.

[anewaname]

I do what Naia does, keeping the prepared meal stockpile in the central area of the fort and keeping the other foods farther away so dwarfs will usually find the prepared meals first.