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[Girlinhat]

So, we've got poison classes and reaction classes, but how about food classes?  Right now it's either edible or not.  How about making humans incapable of eating raw plump helmets?  Or making a species that only eats a type of prepared grass?  When we're able to harvest grass and bundle it, we could have playable panda-men by making bamboo a special food-class, and only allowing pandamen to eat this class?  Not to mention, herbivore types of creatures and having special castes with different nutritional needs.  Perhaps a certain caste of warlock-types will only eat prepared brain and won't eat strawberries?  Perhaps a race of little gnomelets will only eat strawberries?

[EmperorJon]

Well, Pandas eat only bamboo, so it shouldn't be too hard for toady to increase that for eating as opposed to grazing. And to everyone. Humans and Elves should not be able to eat Plump Helmets! I think having vegetarian dorfs my be amusing. 

[Sutremaine]

How would each food class be categorised? By adding the token to each called material?

Good idea though.

[Girlinhat]

Pretty much, yes.  By default, food would have [FOOD_CLASS:GENERAL] attached, and creatures would be part of the [FOOD_CLASS:GENERAL] group.  This is already done with syndromes that only effect certain creatures, and adding it to food would only take a quick pass of the Notepad++ or similar program.

For other uses, unicorns, mermaids, and gorlacks, all good creatures, could be given the food class GOOD, and make it so that only goblins, kobolds, and other naughty creatures can eat them.  Poisonous plants could only be eaten by very hardy creatures...

[NW_Kohaku]

I do like this idea.  I've been playing around with the notion of having a revision on the way in which nutrition is tracked in DF, such as in the older Down with prepared meals thread, as well as the Improved Farming thread, since eating is a natural extension of farming. 

Making foods become classified into some sort of broad or narrow category would allow for at least some vague sort of nutrition system, where dwarves that don't eat at least one food item with a fruit-type category will become vulnerable to scurvvy, or if you eat almost nothing but grains, you get beriberi.

Of course, it would be useful too in just making something like the minotaurs that were vegetarians, and have trouble eating meat, the way that bulls don't eat meat. 

As for gnomelettes that only eat strawberries... reminds me of some things I remember watching on Nick Jr. as a kid...  (Wait, those were both foreign animations?  Why does that figure?)

Anyway, making food classes that make eyeball grass not edible to cows is a good idea in and of itself, as well, (and something Toady mentioned he wanted to do) so I expect this sort of thing, which already follows some of the basic coding logic DF already runs on, should be fairly simple and logical to implement and use. 

You could have a general "plant" token for strict carnivores that never eat plants, and a vegetable or fruit or grass or more specific hard seed token or the like to have more specific types of tokens.  Animal parts could have specific food type tokens, as well, since not everyone would necessarily be able to eat (or prefer to eat) brains or pancreas.

It's also worth noting that few creatures are utterly and completely carnivorous - look at dog or catfood, and you'll see rice or corn are pretty high up there in the ingredient list, and those animals are "carnivores".  They just have a diet based upon eating very large amounts of meat for their nutrition, and little plant matter, so having a nutritional system based upon eating, say, at least 70% meat (for hypercarnivores) in their diet per period of time might be the best way to go about doing things.

Also, on the topic of being evil to eat a mermaid (which, being sentient, only elves and goblins woud do, anyway, right?), a childhood spent playing Nintendo has taught me that there is a Japanese legend that mermaids are (ageless) immortal, and eating one would make you immortal, as well.  (And just looking onto Google for a reference, the second hit was some islamic website where one guy was saying that if you ever caught one, it's totally OK to eat one, since "dolphin" is "pig of the sea", so eating a "human of the sea" is halaal/kosher, too!  For fairness, this was disputed.)  I wonder how you're supposed to season mermaid?

[Girlinhat]

With sea salt, of course :3

I'd only support the diet variety if they'll actually try and eat.  As it is, Anyone eats whatever, and if they happen to Like it, they're happier, but if you have some sweet pod syrup roasts, then more often than not your dwarf who likes it will eat the plump helmet because it's closer.  If they'll actively try to eat a balanced diet, that would be pretty awesome.  It also means the generic Helmet+Wine forts will have to get out of their ever-so comfortable purple niche.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, that's part of it.  Fortresses seem to go by having things like "all-meat" fortresses or else "all plump helmet" or basically just throwing everything into just one or two types of food, which would lead to sickness because of dietary imbalance.  The idea would be that you could have some wide lattitude in what balance of food you have, but that you can't let dwarves eat less than 5% of their diet without some kind of meat or eggs or milk, since going purely vegan is impossible without dietary supplements. 

Of course, this whole thing gets tied up in the prepared foods threads type of deal again.