Dammit i just found a pile of Lavish meal [18], sitting on top of a barrel. That's 8 more then a barrel will accept as anything beyond [10 ] is cannot fit. This will now sit in the commons area and generate flies and eventually have to be thrown out. Maybe a few dwarves will be able to get some nourishment from this incredible waste of resources.
Does this happen to you guys a lot ?
I'm trying to assess how i'm doing and i just can't seem to get barrels under control. How big are your stockpiles?
Right now i'm struggling with barrels, stockpiles(which i'm very confident with) and barrows, trying to get automation under control. I thought i had it when i had a almost perfectly automated jewel crafter with no job cancellations but then things started to spiral out of control which i really can't even detect because i'm just getting a tremendous volume of stockpile cancelations from item haulers. My butchering never got done despite prioritizing the order nor did the last carcases meat get stored and now kakapo intestines are generating miasma despite months to put this stuff away.
Either i'm missing something or i'm being way to speciific with my burrows or my stockpiles need to be bigger. My stockpiles are pretty small right now.
I don't usually use burrows much, preferring to fiddle with labor settings (turning off the big-volume wood/stone hauling for important dwarves). Mostly use them for trade depot, sometimes temporarily if I want to force my good mason to stay at the workshop despite large-scale aboveground constructions being done by my hordes of dabbling masons, for example. So I'm guessing that overly specific burrows and/or labor settings are keeping your dwarves so busy they're not doing their stuff. The loads of item hauling cancellations sounds like you have some problems with your stockpile setup, for sure.
As to whether your stockpiles are big enough or not, are they full? If your raw food stockpiles, especially the one for meat, is full, of course they won't haul the prepared intestines there. And yes, meals on stockpiles won't rot; worst-case scenario is that some of them will be eaten by vermin.
One thing you can do (but will be considered exploity by many) if you want automatisation and small stockpiles, is to have minecarts do automatic quantum stockpiling for most goods. You need 2 squares of tracks, a smallish source stockpile for the first tile (3 squares could easily be enough), which is also a hauling route stop, a dumping track stop for the latter tile/hauling route stop, and a 1-square stockpile that it dumps to. Fit all stockpiles into ~6 tiles each, with no upper limit on the stored amount.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for food though, as I'm not 100% certain on the amount how cart-stasis works, and you'll probably need a lot of food to fill a cart. Lots of other industries where it will take a looong time to fill a cart exist, too: eg. a cartful of crafts is 2500 units, I hear, so even with "at least 25% items" departure settings, you're still looking at 625 crafts before the cart leaves. If you're using carts for quantum stockpiling in lots of places, you probably don't want too many carts with always push off at time X, either.