in 7D2D some of My usual Players chuckle at Me, because I insist on bringing back snowballs from the Winter biome to form a bottom layer of any container holding raw or cooked foods. Just My way of simulating a scenario where keeping raw and uncanned consumables cold, would be desired.
Players can interpret things to make the game seem more immersive, everything doesn't have to be spelled out in game mechanics to simply have a good time in playing in the zombie apocalypse.
Well it depend on how spoilage is implemented.
One I liked is that the stack only spoils one at a time, removes one item from the stack then resets the timer ark style for better words for it. cooling and freezing to slow it down.
Since there already a lot of mechanics ingame a de-buff would be better.
Having a higher chance of causing food poisoning over time for the entire stack giving the other perks a buff that way as well.
For Master-chef you craft at 0.0% food poisoning and the others at 2% time passes by and the food poisoning chance increases buffing the value of the Iron Gut.
So how it should work.
Farming fresh product is 0.0% till bad 100% chance of poisoning.
The higher the de-buff the less items you need to make a seed tie that together with the living of the land seed-crafting turning the de-buff in to a chance of crafting one seed from one item.
Starting with max living of the land -25% chance to succeed to a seed from one item craft at de-buff 0.0% till a 75% chance to craft a on 100% of the de-buff
Level two starting at 50% and level one at 75%
Spoilage example.
Corn 7days.
Potato 10days.
Blue berry 4 days.
Hunting,
Fresh meat 0.0% till 100% should last at leased 5 days before it reaches 100% and have the option to scrap to rotten meat.
Would be nice to split it in to different types of meat, venison, rabbit, pork ect.
Cooking,
This will reset the food item but the higher the de-buff the more items you need to cook the recipe with (your cutting off the bad stuff)
Master chef has the advantage here because they start with less items needed.
Slowing things down could be done with the icebox adding snowballs as fuel or with a working refrigerator what could be added as a learn only to the advanced engineering perk.
The robotics inventor could add a learn only icebox mod to the drone as wel.