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[Haruspex_Pariah]

I thought of going to Suggestions for this but figured I'd check here first. Currently I've hit an error in my crop planting and have insufficient booze-plants. My dorfs however insist on eating the few remaining plump helmets I have which means I have to use herbalists to prevent drying up (hovering at 40+ drinks in a 75 pop fort). If I can hang on until the current season's plants are harvested that's fine, but I shouldn't have to do that. I have plenty of meat and prepared meals on hand for the dwarves to eat.

Is there a way to set plants for brewing only and not eating?

[Rex_Nex]

I see your problem. I wonder if putting your brewer in a room with a storage pile of forbidden plump helmets, and then locking the room and unforbidding the food would force your dwarves to let him make booze.

[Hungry Elephant]

Well if it works well, you can con to the status screen with z key, then kitched and set the food use. You can forbid cook and allow brew for that type of food or forbid both in case of seeds.

[shlorf]

Make a confined area with a still and a plant stockpile and quantum dump the plump helmets in from above. Basically a complicated version of what rex_nex suggested.
A 3rd option on the kitchen screen to toggle eating for food items would be great, tho.
Alternative solution: Screen all dwarfs, atom smash anyone who 'likes plump helmets for their round heads'.
Disabling cooking won't stop dwarfs from eating stuff raw.

[Sphalerite]

The kitchen menu only lets you disable cooking and brewing.  You can't disable eating of a foodstuff raw, short of forbidding it or making it physically inaccessible.  The good news is that eating plump helmets raw yields plump helmet spawn, which your farmers can plant and turn into more plump helmet fairly quickly.

[Girlinhat]

As far as I know, it's all about distance.  If you give them something to eat that's closer, they'll go for that instead.  So, if you have a dining hall assigned, put a food stockpile in there, and your idle dwarves will naturally consume the closest food on hand.  Enhance this by building your stills a bit off the beaten trail, where people are less likely to stop mid-walk and say "ZOMG there's mushrooms behind that still!"

Also, I have no idea how traffic restrictions interact with food, and I don't know if you can set a food stockpile to Restricted to prevent immediate consumption, but I think that it won't matter, because "Eat" is a job, and jobs don't care about traffic.

[Makigall]

My latest fort I set out with the goal of mastering everything agriculture related.  Something I've found to work but tends to be expensive on the barrels is to have one large stockpile near my fields set to plants only.  Kitchens get a stockpile near them for everything except booze, seeds and plants.  Stills get stockpiles only allowing booze.  And what happens is every harvest goes into its own stockpile near the fields until that stockpile is full, once its full dwarfs will begin letting plants rot in the fields, which is fine, because we've got tons of plants already.

Then kitchens and stills do all their business from the plant stockpile.  I've never had a problem with not having plants for booze.  I've had plenty of slowdowns on barrels though.  But then again I've just gotten to 4000 units of booze, which means my fort of 175 can stay sloshed for over a year in case of catastrophic loss of brewer.

I think the problem of running out of crops comes from filling stockpiles with other things.  If there's no stockpile for a plant your farmers will leave it to rot in the field.  Which generally isn't a problem, but the stuff in stockpiles can then rot at the same time which can mess things up really fast.

[Girlinhat]

I was under the impression that food on a stockpile never decayed.  At least, in my multi year fort with some several hundred plant stockpile tiles, I've never had a rotten plant that wasn't on the field.

Stockpiles end up being the issue though.  I've got two separate 49 tile stockpiles for plump helmets only, though it appears I may want to branch out a bit, because my doodz are tired of the same old booze.

[Demicus]

Stockpiles slow rot, but they don't necisarrily stop it. To completely stop rot you need barrels and cats. Barrels protect the food from dwarves walking over it, and the cats protect your food from vermin.

[Girlinhat]

Special barrels will pretty much stop vermin, too.  Allegedly, metal barrels protect against vermin better, and the value of the metal determines the level of protection.

[Lagslayer]

How do dwarves determine what they eat? Do they always prefer cooked food? Is it based on distance? Do they choose their favorite food first? Or is it random? If we can determine how they choose, you can place your booze plant stockpile in a better location and save yourself some micromanagement.

[Haruspex_Pariah]

It's actually just a shortage of boozeplants, I have more than enough stockpile space. I set the field (5 by 5) to have quarry bushes in the spring, and boozeplants the rest of the year. I thought since the plot was the largest plot I ever had it would be fine, but apparently not. I've since switched quarry bushes to sweet pods, which can become rum or syrup as the situation demands.

[Demicus]

Not sure but I think Dwarves prefer higher value meals (probably because the game equates value to flavor when talking about food)

Probably some multipliers like distance and personality. Makes since to me at least.

[zephyr_hound]

I always have several different food stockpiles including one for prepared meals that allows no barrels. The prepared food pile goes right underneath/on top of my meeting hall/dining room, so that the majority of dwarves when hungry will take from there. The raw food pile is a little more out of the way, in a direction I haven't otherwise expanded into. Nearly all the time a dwarf who is hungry finds himself closer to a cooked meal and picks from there instead of eating the raw stuff.

[brucemo]

I have a couple of workarounds for you:

1) Bring more food and booze on initial embark.

2) Have a dwarf start gathering plants as soon as you have a food stockpile up.  Three or four rope reeds turns into 15 or 20 drinks, and dwarves can't eat rope reeds.