as someone who has perpetually danced the line of "tryhard" and "adequate village" 100% do not ever trust or rely on a "communal cook" if you're trying to actually pump stats in any way whatsoever, because if you aren't eating in INTENSE MODERATION (sometimes even below your energy requirements) you'll probably burn your cook out in less than a month. communal cook more or less would exist to rotate materials through storage, make energy food, buff village-critical roles in the earlier parts of the world, and then they ideally fizzle out to doing something else or quit.
your material intake should match your cooked food production, which you should directly try to match to your food intake. if your village stockpiles materials publicly, you should be basically undetectable when you're grinding stats. just find a tempo you can keep up with indefinitely.
do not bother with pepper unless you have a very coherent bot setup, it is laughable how much effort goes in to 1kg of pepper in a bad manual setup, compared to even the most rudimentary botted setup. if you absolutely insist on manually doing a luxury tedium food enhancer, truffles aren't the absolute worst thing to torture yourself with.
falling in to "powerfoods" philosophy is a mistake if you are not a powerplayer, you will never reasonably supply yourself with driftkelp, fairy shrooms, etc. your bread and butter will almost always be pork or double-spiced this double-spiced that, or some smoked sausages of certain varieties. alternatively, one whale (which also, dont bother if you dont at least have some means to automate the searching process) should last you a while, as an individual. do not make it a communal resource. if your whale intake is small pp, focus on the whale efficient recipes (ie stuffing-based or autumn steak)
if you have any vague interest in grinding stats, spam kill bears, spam kill canglers (arguably one of the most important creatures to have a good node for,) kill beavers, kill slimes, kill pelicans. early world tame as many fucking boars as you can for your animal person, until they're begging you to stop. lock down every individual spice and help your gardener get as many bulk pots up as possible. desperately rush a snekkja and knarr as quickly as you can that you can afford to devote to whale hunting. ignore orcas, they're basically worthless unless you're Snail or it's really early world.
worthwhile mentions from my personal experience:
hoard any drink you see. trade it among fellow feastbois.
but also, your fellow feastbois are not your allies and even if they're literally living in the same plot as you,
they can and will eat your Gelatin.ease of production will absolutely always trump results unless hunger is your bottleneck (which it shouldn't be by the time tables are 30-40% hunger)
do not get tunnel vision looking at stat aggregate websites, there are some nuances involved in every recipe. for instance, if you have a sick ass cauldron but a trash meat grinder, or shitty meat smokers, try to see if there are viable cauldron-influenced recipes for your stat. inversely, some recipes aren't worth trying to make your best of. quantity over quality rules for quite a few things, with cheese and baked goods being the biggest and easiest examples.
do not share your table with anyone that doesn't take stat gain as seriously as you do, you would be very surprised by the atrocities that happen at a communal table.
the absolute best time to take stat gain seriously is around the first or second player drop-off of the world, because you start to see less competition for localized resources and usually your industries are more fleshed out. i've seen some wild glow-ups of very special boys grinding up to 4k stats within the span of less than a month because they laid infrastructure like they were digging trenches in Verdun.
infrastructure >>>>>>>>> early effort in most cases
hope any of this helps some of you people who always hit the 400-1000 stat wall and get confused and lost.