As per our short conversation in the comment section. I'd like to put forward the suggestion of having specific ingredients have special effects. As much as I like the ready-made recipes in the various crafting stations, I really like Ark's native custom food system and RPCooking's expansion and plethora of ingredients.

Seeing as some recipes already have benefits (e.g. iced tea raising hyperthermal insulation), it would be interesting for these effects to be achievable through the custom foods system (e.g.: adding ice to any drink temporarily increases hypothermal insulation). Adding pepper could increase hypothermal insulation but also decrease hiperthermal insulation. Adding sugar could apply a temporary multiplier to stamina regeneration. Alcohol could increase melee damage but also give torpor, while coffee could decrease torpor (or increase the rate at which torpidity is lost). Adding salt could increase the duration of these buffs, or percentually increase the benefit multiplier (with diminishing returns, evidently). There's so much potential to explore here.

The idea is you could have different meals for different occasions but you're also free to create your own combinations. What if I want a peach flavoured iced tea?

I'm not sure how the programming side of things work, but something to bear in mind is the possiblity of this being exploited by creating a super-food, like. Something that gives you ALL the buffs. There should be something in place to prevent this, but I'm not at all code savvy, so I'm not sure what would work here.

Anyway, just a few ideas.