This probably falls under the category of Things You Don't Need To Do.
Early on, food and booze production are pretty important. The very first thing I do after embark is set up a way to flood an underground cavern and drain it so I can plant plump helmets. But fairly quickly, by the end of the second year at most, I'm absolutely overflowing in food. So far as I can tell, that's all you really need to do. No need to mess with other crops, surface crops, milling, or cooking. Just mushrooms to eat and ferment.
Still, I try for a more sophisticated food system when I can afford it, and it probably contributes in some hard-to-measure way to dwarf happiness, since I've seen "ate a great / decadent meal recently" often enough.
The problem, to my mind, is that there's no good solution to producing "balanced" meals. Your cook grabs whatever is closest. If you put a stockpile that allows anything cookable nearby, pretty soon it's completely overrun with plump helmets and strawberries. I feel that if I'm going to go through the effort of milling flour, grinding sugar, making syrup, and rendering tallow, all that stuff should be used in roughly equal proportions in my meals. Nor do I want to give up on simple plants entirely - it seems there's always a surplus of those once things are rolling, and it annoys me to think that
all of them are rotting in the fields, never to be eaten. Brewed maybe, but not eaten.
Since in a economy with a significant surplus, mixed-type storage piles tend to fill with whatever you have the most of, to the exclusion of all else, I wanted to set up a system where my kitchen was precisely the same distance from several different ingredient piles. I ended up with this.
That may seem excessive for a single kitchen, but the idea is that this is my entire raw food stock, excepting local stocks for the stills. If I want multiple kitchens, I can stack them vertically above or below this one, but generally one is plenty even for a fort full of hungry dwarves. Whenever possible, I try and set it up so the dwarves eat cooked food only, but some still insist on raiding the pantry for horse haunches and mushrooms.
- Gus