I just downloaded the new version and tried cooking with fire for the first time.
It was extremely frustrating!
First off, your character is apparently too dumb to move away from the fire if it spreads, leading to massive smoke inhalation that you can't stop because he's also too dumb to stop crafting. You also need to tend to the food constantly: If cooking your breakfast takes an hour and a zombie interrupts you 45 minutes in, that time is totally wasted. Also, there's really too much smoke to begin with; a campfire shouldn't give off so much smoke that it causes you physical harm (unless you're particularly stupid about how you use it), and it should probably depend on the material being burned as well. Basically, it's just a pain in the ass to cook using a fire unless you have a lot of time to waste.
EDIT: I'm not in a good position to try to solve this, not being the developer (or even a developer), but I was thinking... maybe allow for resuming crafting recipes? That way, if interrupted in the middle of crafting an item, you end up with an "unfinished <product>" in your inventory that you can continue work on later. This would allow interruptions to be less disastrous, especially for something like cooking.
Of course, some kinks would need to be worked out. For instance, the game would need to ask you to pick ingredients (and consume those items) when crafting starts, not when it ends, and charges (e.g. for a hotplate or soldering iron) would have to be consumed intelligently enough for it to make sense. Also, for things like cooking, allowing the player to resume a pot of spaghetti a day later would be silly, so some sort of timer would be required.