Cheese, as any other type of food, always rots. I removed rotting from nails (what can you use those for?), teeth and scale.
The whole point of hard cheese is that is doesn't rot as quickly as milk. If both have ROTS tag, milk and cheese rot at the same rate, was that one season in DF?
Are you sure that prepared meals rot in DF?"When I pressed them, they said that waxed cheeses could be kept for up to 5 years when refrigerated at 38 to 40 degrees. They also said that the cheese would get very sharp after 2 to 2 and 1/2 years." --someone
Beeswax covers on cheese
3 years is a very long time in a sieged Genesis fort.
Nails? Well... new reaction: 8 nails/tigerclaws plus some leather into a wearable leather cap "claw necklace".
On another note, spiked helmets make me want there to be a headbutt command. It would be very dwarvenly (or dorfenly, depending on your mood) to make one's head a weapon, especially a steel dwarf.
A non Genesis question: Can a creature killed in combat (say, a raptor) be butchered and skinned? I know it's possible to get raptor leather, but my dwarves refuse to turn anything I kill outside the slaughter command into meat or leather.
Headbutting is for Toady to implement, can't be done by modding (except rename beast's bite,punch,claw,kick attack into "headbutt").
Command "o r o" to allow outdoors refuse to be hauled! And for post-battle medical time, the "o"rders menu has things you might want to turn off to get people to haul less and attend to survivors more.
"o sw" is very popular with me, stop stone and wood hauling if there's other stuff to do.
Culinary stuff... meat+pepper=sausage. meat+rock salt boulder=salty sausage. Finer sausage if include animal guts.
OMG! Idea! Actually adding 'cooking' (Not the cooking in vanilla DF, which is more or less making a dish, not just cooking the ingredients.), so you'd have to cook meat, organs, and some vegetables before eating them! It's fun adding to the difficulty, because that adds to the Fun!
Almost all organs and meat have [EDIBLE_COOKED] and no [EDIBLE_RAW], so they can not be eaten raw in Vanilla or Genesis.