You can do it yourself in the Kitchens menu (under the 'z' status screen).
Yes, but that should not be necesary and should be default to something that is not liability. (In same vein that corpse items and used ammunition are forbidden by default to prevent sock-runs and bolt-run suicides and cooking seeds is disabled to prevent unwanted seed destruction.).
For new player which is likely to accidentally cook his booze, it saves frustration.
For me as a bit experienced player, this has became one of little hoops i have to jump through on embark before game really starts: visit kitchen menu, turn off booze cooking. Then visit it later when you get new kinds of booze and turn it off too.
It is annoying like hell after few embarks to do exactly same setting.
I dunno about changing the default settings, but it would be nice if you could toggle on and off entire categories of food for cooking. Booze, seeds, milled plants, meat, and so forth. Well, I guess it would have to be a three-position toggle: on, off, and "custom."
That's a good idea too, so there's no reason we couldn't have both: let us set the defaults for each category in a file somewhere as on/off, and have us do any "custom" modifications in game, like we already do. Should probably add brewing defaults to that, too.
So I could default it so that in each and every new game I start, milled plants & meat are set to be cooked, but booze, seeds and unmilled plants are not. But in game, I could later decide that I can cook all the seeds I got by drowning elves or whatever that I can't actually plant by toggling those specific seeds on.
Indeed, i would prefer that too.
I, for example, always end up disabling brewing for thread producing plants, cooking booze and cooking brewable plants
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It occurs to me that Kitchen menu should also have
option to toogle milling for plants. You problably want to toogle miling for Cave wheat when you are brewing it or when you really only want to mill dyes.