I've decided to just grow corn and nothing else. Not even gonna cook them.

[EvadableMoxie]

Since you can turn 0.5 nutrition into 0.9 nutrition via cooking it into meals, you'll need to grow a lot more corn, which will reduce the amount of labor and time you're actually saving.  If you aren't hauling it, it will decay due to not being roofed, making it impossible for you to stockpile any meaningful amount of food.  Since corn takes a long time to grow, one lost harvest from a cold snap or blight might be the end of your colony.  I also hope you enjoy food poisoning because you'll have a nice 2% chance every single time a colonist eats.

Even if that doesn't happen, you're taking a -7 mood penalty when you could easily just cook fine meals for +5, a swing of 12 mood. 

This is the part where inexperienced players say something like "But I have no problem with mood so it's okay."

When things are going well, you have no problem with mood.  But someone's wife will get storytold, you'll get psychic drones, you'll get psychic ships, you'll get someone's mom joining the enemy raider group, and of course someone has to haul all those corpses after a tribal raid and take the penalites. Are you going to be caravaning? Do you want your people on the caravan to have a -7 mood penalty and 2% food poisoning chance?

Even if shit doesn't happen, high mood is a good thing.  It's a great thing.  It gives you inspirations.  Do you like making Masterwork and Legendary stuff? Because you won't if you're managing mood to stay just above breaking.

But okay, let's say you somehow NEVER run into ANY of those problems and NO ONE ever mental breaks EVER and you don't care at all about inspirations....  Okay.  Why aren't you using your mood as a resource? Why aren't you wearing more dead man's clothes and armor, why aren't you butchering more humanlike for hats, why aren't you selling more tribals into slavery? 

[Blato]

A more economical way to free up a colonist if you don't want someone dedicated to cooking is to use a nutrient paste dispenser;
1. No food poisoning, ever.
2. Mood debuff from raw food is -7, from eating paste is -4
3. Paste converts less food into more nutrients, meaning it can be powered by just rice.

If you want to free up pawns, nutrient paste is the way to go. Not only will you free up a cook, the nutrient conversion is so good you'll also need half as much fields, which means half as much pawns growing, even more free pawns!

You can micro a NPD by drafting a hungry pawn who took a meal to drop it. Forbid the meal, and then just draft/undraft until he drops as much meals as you want.
Not sure why you'd do that though, since the meals can spoil, and taking a meal from the dispenser is an instant action, no wait time required. So walking to a dispenser or walking to a stored paste meal is virtually the same time waste. So you shouldn't worry about a storage space for meals, just keep the paste dispenser between the sleeping and work areas, so they can get their meals to and from.

[Bolgfred]

I was pissed by cooking aswell. Making me make a similar decision like PO, but I started to use strawberries only, because according to the wiki Corn has only 17% more nutrient per day than strawberries.

Anyway, I started strawberries and I was happy for the beginning, as its been  now cooking, and berries keep around 11 days, much longer than meals. At first I was happy, but now I am back into the cooking businis, as I noticed cookig with a cook is not that much work than I thought to remember. Comparison:


Raw Food(strawberries):
+Similar output than corn per tile (-17%)
+No cook time
+No cooking skill required
+eat at work (every room can have a single food storage)
+fast grow speed, less risk

-More planting work with strawberry than corn
-Mood debuff
-Good cook can cook fast
-2% food poison is 2% food poison

Eating raw food has benefits, if you don't have the infrastructure for cooking.
This means, having a strong planter, but no cook, is a valid solution, because it always works: If you cook strawberries you have a meal. If you cannot cook, there are berries in the fridge. If you cannot take time for hauling, there is a field with harvested berries on it: finger food. So, if you have no manpower, one planter alone can do the food thing.
Downside to corn would be that the debuff can be a problem as early you have bigger downspikes in mood. A bad cook, will cook very slow, blocking that one completely and has a higher poison chance. A good cook, will cook very fast with a good setup and garantee 0% food poison. Fine meal's buff is much better than raw food penalty as +4 give the edge to happiness, but -4 doesn't make any difference.

Conclusion:
-Plant rice/corn if you're very low on manpower.
-Plant strawberries if you're low on manpower.
-Plant strawberries if you have no cook.
-Start cooking when you have a good cook.
-Train your cook if you don't have one(No flame will still able to reach cook 10)

[Dargaron]

@EvadableMoxie: Is "Storytold" the new euphemism for a colonist dying? If so, I approve.

@Topic in general: As a tundra player, the idea of growing massive corn fields amuses me. Corn is extremely fragile due to its high grow time: one Cold Snap can mean almost a quadrum and a half of wasted grow time, and when you have any kind of restricted growing period, that's nasty.

Cooking time isn't all it's cracked up to be. If you have a setup with a stove directly next to the freezer, then it takes no time at all for the cook to produce simple meals at an alarming rate. Attached is my food setup on a 10/60 Tundra map: it'd be more efficient if I had a Heater and Lamp in the Kitchen, but I only recently got batteries, so...

[attachment deleted due to age]

[vampiresoap]

Yeah but then you gotta set up a freezer. I can have a giant food storage area for raw corn, but you can't really have a giant freezer because that'll cost you too much power. Plus, 4 huskies can easily haul all the corn in the world back to storage. All you really need is just one farmer...who works only like 2 months per year and you're set.

[5thHorseman]

@EvadableMoxie: Is "Storytold" the new euphemism for a colonist dying? If so, I approve.

Not dying per-se. But anything really bad that happens for a (perceived or actual) RNG reason that was (again perceived or actual) put in the game for "storytelling" reasons and not for more traditional game balance reasons (that can, like everything else, but perceived or actual).

I like it too, but I won't use it as it feels derogatory.

[vampiresoap]

I've been trying this middle ground solution that some of you have suggested and it's working pretty well, so thanks!

So I just set the "cook simple bill" to do until 5 (or however many colonists I have), and then I set pause when finished and unpause at 0. That way the colony will produce JUST enough simple meals for the pawns to eat and nothing will deteriorate. I think it's the perfect middle ground solution for now.

[Doug]

I'm playing a game in an infested caves biome using a mod (I forgot what the mod was called) and wood is very rare to harvest for cooking. There are a few open unroofed areas on the map for growing but it's still hard to have enough wood. So my colonists have been eating raw corn, they get food poisoning every so often but when I was cooking the food I noticed if your cook has a low skill (mine was 5) the chance to get food poisoned seemed even more than eating raw due to incompetent cook.