There are a few specific purposes for this mod:

• Make eating and hunger a more significant mechanic in the game rather than an afterthought, by making regular full meals more necessary.
• Balance the different kinds of foods to make them less obviously better or worse than one another, as well as more sensible in general.
• Give the various foods more niche uses where reasonable, rather than many of them effectively being re-skinned duplicates of varying efficiencies.
• Return alcohol to its natural state as a tool by which one achieves inebriation, rather than that of a nutritious food that happens to contain alcohol.
• Extend the lifespan of all foods so that they do not expire so rapidly that it's a chore to keep up with one's supplies.
• Label all food, drink, and potion items in the food.xml file so that other modders or tinkerers can more easily work with the items' stats.
  

*This mod does not change potions/poisons/etc. in any way except to label them in the .xml file.

Food:
For numbers 1 through 3, I've done my best to be reasonable with the changes, making the nutrition values make sense compared to real life while not over-doing the reduction in nutrition provided. As it stands, you should find it necessary to eat two vaguely decent meals a day, though I haven't spent much time play-testing it yet. Health values have on average been increased, and energy has been fairly substantially reworked. Meats and a variety of other foods now sap a fair bit of energy from the player (which I felt was reasonable most specifically because, in my experience, energy can be very easily maintained with an extremely modest amount of sleep), while fresh fruits as well as some vegetables tend to invigorate the player. 

Alcohol:
Alcohol will also go quite far towards making one ready for a good night's rest, and all of them have had their energy penalty increased at least slightly. Most alcohols now provide much less nutrition, because beer shouldn't *literally* be interchangeable with bread, although all alcohols now provide more health than they previously did (if I remember correctly, anyway; I'm pretty sure I increased all of them). Cheap wine had its stats reduced across the board, under the logic that it would likely be watered-down on top of not having been great quality to begin with. Regular and fine wines' alcohol contents were lowered as well, though not as drastically- and fine wine is somewhat stronger than the more mundane variety. Liquor ought to get you hammered in general, as is the natural order of things, but it's also quite useful for healing. Gameplay reasons aside, my logic here was that during this time period healing a man's wound and numbing his pain were close enough so as to make no difference. I also tried here as with food to give the different liquors somewhat distinct stats, while keeping a good general balance. That all said, I expect I'll probably go through and change the alcohol content of many of the items once I've played with them for a bit.

Spoilage:
The time it takes for food to spoil has been extended x5 times over, since I felt it was tedious to have to keep track of food when it all spoiled so quickly, and that it made managing what you ate and how much you kept on you unnecessarily tiresome and annoying. Now, you're able to pick up some more nutritious perishables without worrying about them spoiling by the time you've walked to the next town over, or go hunting without the majority of your catch having lost all value by the time you can sell it.

.XML Labeling for Modders:
Lastly, in reference to the food.xml file, I went through and added a commented-out line above each individual item, labeling what it was and whether it was cooked, uncooked, booze, or a potion, wherever applicable (which should allow for easy ctrl+f'ing). If anybody wants to use this mod as a baseboard for their own alterations, reference, or what have you, feel free. If you use it in another mod, all I'd ask is that a bit of credit be given. Unfortunately, while I did the labeling before making any modifications elsewhere, I didn't have the forethought to save that as an independent file for people to use as a reference should they want to edit the vanilla values. Apologies for that- I was kicking myself when I realized I hadn't thought of it. At the very least, it'd probably be easier for someone to copy/paste the commented out lines into the vanilla .xml if they wanted to. Alternatively, for those using notepad ++, there is a comparison tool/plugin that should be able to show the two files side-by-side, witch spaces added to the vanilla file so that the lines of code are still even between them. That'd actually be a pretty decent workaround, imho.


To install:
This mod installs the same way as most other mods for this game. Simply download the .zip and extract its contents into the Data folder in your game's directory. When you're done, there should be a file called something like zzz_food_and_booze.pak inside your Data folder.

Any and all feedback is appreciated! Suggestions are welcome too, if you have them. (:

I'd also like to give credit to Alienhand here on nexusmods for creating the Alternate Food Spoil mod, which I used as a baseboard for creating my own. Your work was very appreciated!