I spent like an hour running around sparring my friend at a siege today, along with cutting some trees to make catapults & regenerating some SHP. I gained about 130-140% hunger. This really doesn't matter to me at this point in the game, but to players with a bit less resources that are still grinding stats it would - and in the early game it affects everybody. So much of my early game is centered around min/maxing hunger like taking alts to do any kind of non-skilled physical labor whenever I leave the base for anything, ever. Digging dirt on 5 unsubbed/verified alts instead of my crafter/fighter. You get the idea.
I think this is a big pain point for people who don't really know what they're doing, as they get fucked by doing, well, anything - and for more experienced players it makes certain activities punishing that would otherwise be fun. Win an early game fight, but you went through two whole energy bars on sprint terrain? Legitimately wasted like 20% of the next week's potential stat growth off the back of WINNING one encounter.
I think this is something that would be very trivial to alleviate, with either a method to eat food that doesn't cost hunger or provide FEP, or just a VERY inexpensive/relatively easily bulkable/doesn't take a week to age drink that provides a lot of hunger. Or, you know, just make foods that are typically used for hunger(mushroom spits, roasthopper, odd tubers, rat on a stick, grilled frogs legs, cattail stew, butter porridge, roast meat, etc) not give FEPs or hunger.
Reducing the amount of energy burned from consuming water, especially lowQ water, and or increasing the energy gained from food might also be cool?