I've allowed hay to be grown in hydroponics with simple xml edit, because obtaining high quantities of hay is near to impossible on ocean ice sheet and figured out that hay beats rice even in hydroponic tray because:
* needs less micro from farmers - longer growing period
* needs no refrigerated storage
* larger stack size
* larger nutrition per day - 0.169 vs 0.148 of rice
When cooking fine meals, chefs can take 5 vegetables, 1-4 pieces of meat/milk and 1 egg and cook fine meal; but at the same time they can cook 1 egg and 5 vegetables. So basically meat/milk can be wasted. Non-determenistically (sometimes chefs pick ingredients in right order) can be reproduced by placing 1 milk, 5 rice and 1 egg and ordering to cook fine meal.
Also, mod really screws up caravans. During hostile encounters they become drafted and swap their gear with the one stored in dresser at base. But once they are undrafted, they swap to whatever I could not even figure out what it is, mostly naked. Had an unfortunate experience of them doing so the middle of an ice sheet during winter.
I just leave them where they are unless they have some juicy prosthesics. In arctic biome they will never rot, slowing and demoralizing incoming invaders.
Actually setting food stockpile in prison helped my colonists to survive in extremely harsh climate AKA glacier. In Superior Crafting mod - where it's not quite simple to set up hydroponics, they had to live on 4 tiles of hydroponics growing agave until I've managed to buy more wood and research nutrient paste.