How far have you gone this playthrough?

[Suxar]

Yeh, the increases are big; but I'm not starving even without them. At worst I'll eat a few cans, but mostly it's a diet of chicken and bacon for me.

It depends where and how to play.
When you play a single player game, you can rob all the buildings nearby. There is a lot of prey and among it there will be food.
When you play on a PvE server after a wipe, a problem arises. The houses are empty, there are no cars, and the merchant will not always give you a quest to clean up nearby. We have to use different tactics.

 

[theFlu]

We have to use different tactics.

Yup.

 

[Riamus]

Wood doesn't matter; what matters is the magazine drop rate and the number of eggs in nests. I noticed that without a cooking point, magazines drop very rarely in kitchen cabinets; even one cooking point significantly increases their number. The same goes for the eggs I eat early in the game. I think the same is clear with farming: I want to start growing what I need as quickly as possible and not think about looking for food.

I wouldn't worry about it for magazines. Farming and cooking magazines drop constantly. Without any points in those, you can quickly max out farming and cooking will be high enough in a short time to make decent food. You won't normally have enough cans to make the higher level foods right away anyhow, so it doesn't matter if food is maxed quickly as long as you can make basic stuff bacon and eggs to begin with and then steak and potatoes or the stews. That can be done without points in a very short amount of time. I never put points into either before about mid-game and I have farming maxed quickly and cooking is up to those levels very quickly as well. If you absolutely can't wait, then you can of course put points into those. But you're not going to run out of food if you don't. At most, maybe you eat eggs for an extra day.

As far as farming goes, you can find seeds all the time, so you can grow what you find and not worry about harvest amounts or seed chances and still grow plenty of vegetables. With steak and potatoes, you don't even need anything other than potatoes, and you can do just fine on that until you're ready to start really pushing your farm. And if you get some farmer armor, you'll increase your farming without perks if you really want it.

In any case, putting points into those is fine if you like to do that. It does increase your food options. However, if you had points into your weapon, you'd have better weapons faster. So depending on whether or not you plan on fighting, that can be a far better option. But it's just personal preferences in the end.