It does not help either that we cranked up the day length to 240 min, meaning there is about 9 to 12 hours between trader resets and you cant really rely on the farms with respawning pigs.
It more depends on your scenarion, less on multiplayer. Longer days make it more difficult, because trader restock and vendor machines restock takes longer. How did you assume it should make it easier?
First source for food are the vending machines. Don't just use that one from the trader, bookmark every working one you can find. Don't eat the cans if possible, keep them for cooking way way better meals.
I also don't know the struggle with meat. We are still drowning in meat. There are chickens and rabbits everywhere. Wolfs in the forest and coyotes in the desert. We just kill them on our way to the next quest. Nobody ever put a point into that hunting-skill that gives you more meat, because we have way enough meat anyway.
The most difficult thing is to get up a farm in the beginning. Not by crafting the plots, but finding seeds (or become able to craft them). It is even easier in the dessert. Just go farming for vultures. Endless rotten meat.
Ironically the first "valuable" food you can craft requires one of the least occuring ressources: Eggs for bacon and egs. Once you can craft vegetable stew, meat stew, sham chowder, eggs become almost worthless (only required for the cheese cake).
If you don't find the recipies early, especially in multiplayer it should not be an issue for ONE player to put some points into Lotl (2) and Master Chef (2). I'll never get why people max out their shotguns with dozens of points but still struggle with food on day 50 because they just refuse to put 4 points into lotl an MC. Yeah, great shotgun... will it kill the ferral before you starve?
I also dunno why people even loot regular pois anymore? Yes, we do that in the first few days, when all quest pois are far away. From like day 7 we only do quests. Why loot a random building, if you can loot a freshly reset building and get an additional reward for that? That makes the loot respawn value completely irrelevant.
Of course food becomes a little more an issue in multiplayer, but not that much. You can loot faster, you can loot more (because every player has his own inventory) or you can split up and loot different pois/do different quests in parallel. And of course 6 players require a bigger farm then one player.
We usually hope to find the meat stew receipe (or better) early. We try to stay feed till then with bacon & eggs. But if we still haven't found it by day 10-14, one player makes master chef to level 2, problem solved.
Same with seeds, if we haven't found seed receips for potatoes, corn and mushrooms, one player puts the second point into lotl.
And all problems are solved.
Nutrition: We mostly go for sham chowder, but also use fish tacos if we have salmon cans. Hobo stew is also fine with 90 food restored. Since we usually keep our food above 50% and with level 65 the max is still "only" 165 points, shepards pie (restores 105 iirc?), tuna toast and spaghetti (i still don't have the receipe for that in our current playthrough) is still almost "overpowered". I'm still not sure if the food counter ticks down based on food consumption or in general, if overeaten.
