So I've noticed that a lot of people really don't like the slow hunger regeneration. Have you considered giving the foods cooldowns instead? So the food would still refill hunger instantly but you'd have to wait 5, 10, whatever seconds before the game will allow you to eat another food item. That would still prevent spam-eating but maybe would confuse and annoy people less. Just an idea, I'm really not sure if it would work better or not.

Another idea: What about removing HP damage from starvation? In real life it would probably take at least a week even for an active person to die from lack of food. (It can take a month for inactive people.) That's really not a short enough period of time to be a credible threat in a video game. But you would also be incapacitated from lack of energy long before you would die. So maybe you could give the player a debuff for starving? Perhaps at 50% hunger you incur a 10% penalty to running speed, jumping height, stamina regen and combat damage. And the penalty steadily increases as your hunger bar decreases, until you have 50% (or worse) penalty at 0% hunger.

That would be a more realistic hunger system and it would encourage players to eat more often because they'd actually feel the less restrictive penalty get worse over time, instead of being totally fine until the last possible second and then binge eating to avoid the harsh starvation penalty.