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[Bauta]

This might be related to this issue ---> http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=158978.0

I noticed that all my dwarfs  have the "lack of decent food" thought despite my fortress cooks only preparing masterwork meals with a wide variety of meat,plants,eggs and fish
I also noticed that none of my dwarfs are using the assigned meeting hall.
They are only standing around in the inn to socialise but they all ignore the prepared food there and instead walk 3 z levels down to eat my unprocessed stuff.
Sometimes a single dwarf will actually walk to my food stores grab something and then eat t in my meeting hall but i have the feeling that this only hapens on very rare occasions
I have set the area as a meeting zone and put a yes into the option on the table, note that they also wont eat in the dining rooms if i set the meeting hall option to no, instead they will reat at randomly free tables in the fortress

[Daris]

I find that there are more reasons to leave food uncooked than to cook it.  Dwarves only get their needs filled if they eat a food they like, and they only reliably take food they like if the food is uncooked.  The quality of a cooked meal is irrelevant, so there's no point in cooking food that can be eaten raw and down sides to doing it.  I'm only cooking foods that aren't edible raw, like eggs and liquids.  My dwarves are happier chowing down on raw unicorn eyeballs than they were when they were eating only masterwork meals.

[PatrikLundell]

As Daris said, dorfs meal needs are satisfied only by eating/drinking something on the "likes" list, and you'll never be able to satisfy 90% of your dorfs because none of their liked things can be acquired.
As far as I understand, dorfs grab food from the location closest (as the dwarf digs) to the location they are at when getting hungry, so a hungry socializing dorf ought to grab something out of the inn store, but if the workshops are closer to another store they'll probably raid that one. As Daris said, they do seem to target raw stuff as well as drinks they like, even if it's a little bit out of the way, but prepared meal contents are unrecognized (or at least not targeted).
Dorfs eat at the free table (or probably chair) closest to where they are when getting hungry. Tables owned by others are usually not used, while table owners tend to target their own tables. A dining hall does seem to be a largely obsolete feature, as tables and chairs in the inn will serve the same purpose (as will tables and chairs in the library, if that's closer when getting hungry).

[Daris]

I think they gravitate toward what is newest on the menu, at least to some degree.  My fort recently killed and butchered a flying slug forest titan, generating ~250 meat.  All that meat was gone within a season.  Why?  Nobody has a preference for forest titan meat, so why did so many dwarves decide that slug meat looked too good to pass up?  I think it's significant that no other food was produced between the titan attack and the point where I noticed all that meat was gone.  My military dwarves will also go straight for the butcher if I'm slaughtering animals when they need provisions.

DF uses last-in-first-out for some things, and I think food selection is one of those things.

[Bauta]

Thats still not explaing why they arent using my meetin halls to eat.
I also have a lot of unprepared stuff, but instead of goin for meat or intestines they go for things like raw Plump Helmets

[eerr]

Have you tried adding catering to your food stockpiles?

Have a preset 1x1 food stockpile and a preset 1x1 drink stockpile that take from a bigger pile.

The dwarves will naturally select the nearby food and come to love it. Also it used to be that this would cycle the food and drink regularly, and dwarves can appreciate the miracle of catering.

[Bumber]

Have you tried adding catering to your food stockpiles?

Have a preset 1x1 food stockpile and a preset 1x1 drink stockpile that take from a bigger pile.

The dwarves will naturally select the nearby food and come to love it. Also it used to be that this would cycle the food and drink regularly, and dwarves can appreciate the miracle of catering.

If you can ensure they're by their own stockpile when they get hungry, and not someone else's.

[Bauta]

I tried the catering with only masterful food enabled, in the food pot was strawberry roast and it was right next to a table and a chair.
instead of eating that my testdwarf left the hall, went straight for some raw strawbery sat down on one of my tables in my military area and ate it there. After tht he still had the thought "unfocused after a lack of decent meals for a long time"
If i lock my dwarfs in with food they will eat it after a while.

[De]

Yeah. Ever since I designated an inn my dwarves have stopped eating in it. They definitely only go for raw food. All I can do with the tons of prepared meals is sell them.

[Daris]

They will occasionally eat cooked food, so it isn't completely useless.  It's less useful than raw food, though, because it doesn't satisfy needs as often as raw food.

[Bauta]

Yeah. Ever since I designated an inn my dwarves have stopped eating in it. They definitely only go for raw food. All I can do with the tons of prepared meals is sell them.

I do the same thing right now, i just saw 5 of my military dwarfs going out to pick berrys instead of eating the food stored right next to them,
They are stationed, trained and housed in my last cavern layer so it tkes them days to go all the way up and back down again 

[Incantatar]

Shouldn't this be a bug? I can't see anything related here http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Known_bugs_and_issues.

I have my prepared meals right under my meeting hall and made a big  artificial detour to my food processing. Most of my dwarves go and eat the raw food anyway. I even had booze problems because they would steal all Plump Helmets before I could brew them, even though I had 100s of meals.
I understand meals don't have any usage anymore except trading so I probably give up on them but I wonder if this is a bug or intended.

[PatrikLundell]

Firstly, making a detour will not achieve anything (except reducing the amount of work performed), as DF usually measure distances as the dwarf digs, and not by calculating the shortest routes to get to them when selecting items/materials to use. That is an optimization to prevent DF from being completely unplayable due to FPS drop.
Secondly, dorfs probably decide what to eat based on preferences for raw food or booze (if available), and thereafter based on the "distance" to food from the point they happen to be at when they decide to eat/drink. Any raw food eating prevention strategies would have to take that into consideration, although it's usually easier to produce more food to compensate for nibbling.

Bauta's comments is probably not dorfs "picking berries" as in wild berries (which would require them having the herbalist skill enabled), but harvesting farm crops. There is a setting to only allow farmers to harvest which will disable that behavior. If that setting is not enabled, every dorf (including children and even residents) harvest occasionally. Harvesting apparently is a very high priority task, particularly prone to hit miners, as mining is one of the few tasks that can be interrupted en route to the digging location.
I would definitely be an improvement if harvesting would be added to the unskilled jobs section so you could select on an individual basis whether dorfs should harvest or not, but it's not a bug.

[mikekchar]

The one advantage that prepared meals have over raw food is that they are made of several ingredients.  So even though the dwarfs are not explicitly searching them out, you may have a higher chance of accidentally eating a favourite ingredient.  This presupposes that you jump through hoops to have meals that are made of lots of different ingredients (generally, never store food in containers, make many 1 tile food stockpiles around the kitchen, each with a different kind of food).

I tend to do this.  The kitchen is supplied by small stockpiles, all taking from a bigger stockpile.  The bigger stockpile can be anywhere -- it just generates hauling jobs.  Normally my farms are 1 level above my kitchen/still and I have an edible plant stockpile there (I have separate farms/stockpiles for cloth production).  The prepared foods are stockpiled near the entrance to the kitchen.  I use the manager to automatically cook meals and I keep only a stockpile of 1 month of prepared meals (each dwarf eats once a month, so if you have 50 dwarfs, then you need 50 prepared meals).  Meal stacks are quite large, so it takes very little space even though I don't use containers.  My butcher is also near the surface (or often *on* the surface).  Since all my production is on lower levels, this makes the prepared meals closer in almost every case.

Anyway, my dwarfs eat prepared meals almost all the time.  I still can't usually give dwarfs what they want to eat, though... :-)

[PatrikLundell]

Based on my experience, I think you're sort of making a mistake, mikekchar. As far as I've seen dorfs can selectively pick up raw food and drink they have a preference for, but I've never seen them take meals with ingredients they like (I stared at the inn for a season or two, and looked a bit at the drink stockpiles as well), even when those are available (someone did report a case of a dorf bypassing other food items to get one with preferred stuff in it, though).
It's quite common for dorfs who like a particular plant to go without because other buggers just take the fresh harvest as "ah, well, this will have to do" before the likers get to them, though.