Thanks Fleeting Frames. I was wondering why I couldn't get the numbers to work out.
I don't think anyone disagrees that roasts are *waaay* overvalued. Stack size aside, a single roast should not work out to 800+ (especially since it wasn't even a masterpiece). Food needs an overhaul in a bad way. I think cooking yield needs to go down a lot.
I was just checking the wiki. Dwarfs eat between every 40-50,000 ticks assuming food is available and they aren't busy. They can go up to 65,000 ticks if they have a long term task. A year is 403,200 ticks, so at most a dwarf eats 10 times a year. A single ingredient counts as a single food. A single tile farm with a half way capable farmer will give you at least a stack of 5 plants per month. A tile is 4 square meters (43 square feet). Just roughly, cereal crop yield in the world now is about 4000 kg per hectare, which works out to 400 *grams* per square meter -- or 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs) per DF tile. Never mind that it's a whole season worth of growth, not just a single month.
So a dwarf can subsist for at least half a year (and realistically a *lot* more) on 1.6 kg of wheat -- or about 3-4 loaves of bread. Or in other words, a single meal (that lasts for at least a month) is composed of 1.5 loaves of bread (or about 7-800 calories) -- realistically a large dinner. A slightly nice wooden wheelbarrow costs 200 units (just sold one recently). If we think that corresponds to about $100, then we are saying that the very nice prepared meal is in the $400 range. That's quite expensive for an 800 calorie meal.
I live in Japan and at New Years people buy osechi (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osechi) bento boxes. Really crazy ones can get up to $100, but most *very high quality* boxes are between $25 and $50. So I'm thinking the price for an exceptional meal is probably about 4-6 times over priced. However the real problem is not the price, it's how little dwarfs eat in fortress mode. Half a day's calories for an entire month!