For me logically it doesnt make a lot of sense how truffles and pepper work.
I have to make the assumption that you want to base your game more or less on reality.
In reality sprinkling truffles and pepper don't increase the nutritional value of a food at least not by much I guess. if anything they would make you want to eat more because it's more tasty or make a disgusting food barely eatable if it's your only choice.
the way sprinkling truffles and pepper work in the game is very op and make them very mandatory.
getting enough good quality truffles is very tedious and especially boring. I'd have to drag my pig with a 64 truffle snout around for an hour to find a few decent ones before every feast. on q40 they give you an FEP multiplyer by 1.84 XD so you can't ignore them at all if you want to take stat gain serious. pepper at q90 multiplies fep by 1.5 which is similiarly illogical as mentioned above.
What I suggest is to either nerf them so hard that they only give a multiplyer of 1.01-1.1 depending on quality when sprinkling to make them not mandatory at all if you cba to set up a bot or run around like an idiot or what I think is a better suggestion is to change their effect to decreasing hunger of that meal. People who have all the salt they need can safely ignore them and the ones who don't can choose to close the gap by putting in effort to get truffles or contest salt or do nothing about it. Also it would make all truffle qualities be worth something wheras q10 truffles kind of ruin your food rn xD
This idea came from thinking about how broken salt is btw, so it kind of would be a double win to change these mechanics.
to me those suggestions would also make sense regarding keeping it based on reality xd
cooking with pepper feels fine tho especially with the recent qol changes.
with my suggestions above you can also get rid of the bum burn wound xd