(I'm not saying this SHOULD be a thing, just something I thought would be a cute touch, as an idea I'll edit this later based on how people see it...)
This might be a bit of a stretch, but what if characters had a favorite food, and a disliked food. As an example. (This isn't for all foods, but just two specific food items for a character each) whenever a character eats that specific food they love, they would say something about it and gain more stats from the food and gain maybe 5 or 10 extra sanity! but when they eat the one food they dislike, they would quote that aswell, maybe gain less percent of the foods benefits and lose maybe 5 or 10 sanity. This could be put for just mainly for only two crockpot foods for each character if you dont want it to affect early game. This could possibly make your choices of food a little bit more strategic and make the characters have more personality.