Animalmen don't appear to carry food with them anymore. Generating a world with vanilla raws and using DFHack to reveal the units on the map shows the tribes, but no items strewn about as they were in .34.11. Might try finding the flag in .34.11, but I'm not sure, if it's still even there anymore.
Preserving items is still possible without custom scripts, just needs more workarounds and materials being defined. Vegetable pickles can't easily use the same items as plant growths, since the material is inherently tied to the growth itself, but they can be defined as [CHEESE_PLANT] for easy stockpiling (and it's at least tangentially similar, being a fermented product). Fish and eggs are more challenging, especially since that the FISH item token is broken. I don't remember, how the rotting behaviour for fish works (tied to the creature materials? hardcoded?)
EDIT: Tested this with createitem in arena; fish items rot only when the creature itself has some material that can rot. Running "createitem FISH WAGON:DEFAULT" makes a prepared wagon fish, and since its only material is wood, the item never rots.
Strangely enough, normal fish are "made of" things like bone, cartilage or chitin. You can even link a material reaction product to a vermin fish's bone and get that product, when you run the reaction using the whole fish as reagent.