God DAMN it.
Didn't realize my dwarves were such proficient cooks.
There are consistently less than 200 meat/fish/plant stocks listed. (They're listed right under the 14000 prepared meals.) So when I bought a truly massive quantity of food from the latest caravan, the food stockpile (which is ruddy massive in its own right) was full, and it all rotted in the depot.
Did you know rotted food is auto-dumped? Neither did I until I happened to glance at my old masons' complex and see it stinking up the joint, as my stone dump zone was the nearest active one. And not only did the imported food rot, but a whole season's worth of above-ground crops too it looks like.
Of course, now that I think of it, all the "Urist McCook has created a masterpiece" spam should have clued me in. Fucking facepalm.
Oh yeah, I have an oversized farm for the purposes of exporting prepared meals and clothing. Every time I drag away workers to do construction work, I wind up with plants "rotting on the vine" all over the place.
Still, if you set up stockpiles for
only prepared food, and prevent any barrels from being added, and set your cooks to "lavish meals" only, you can store much more food, since you can have stacks of something like 90-some-odd food, as opposed to having a seperate barrel for each 10 or so. As long as they are on a stockpile, they don't rot, unless rats get to them.
As for crops rotting... well, you don't really lose that much if you produce more crops than you can process. You use up a single travelling from the warehouse to the field by your farmer, plus the trip to the dump. When they completely rot away, you even get the seeds back.
Farming is a something-for-nothing proposition right now.