Food, huh? Few people ever question how characters can guzzle down several potions and scarf down a meal's worth of food in a few turns/each battle. They must always be hungry 'cause most people would get sick from eating/drinking that much in a short time.

Though it's an action RPG rather than a turn-based, I did encounter a 'Fullness' meter in Muramasa: The Demon Blade. Whenever you eat something, your Fullness meter increases until it hits 100% where you can't eat anymore until it decreases over time. Thus you have to be careful about fighting enemies since you can't conveniently heal off your damage whenever you want. Snacks, things that can be eaten quickly and without any difficulty, don't fill you up too much while a main course would stuff you completely. Food for thought, though I suppose this may be difficult to implement.

Hmm, cooking would be a nice function. Item crafting of a sorts. Honey Pot + Bread = Honey Bread. Though the Honey Pot wouldn't be used up in one meal. It'd just become Honey Pot (Half Full). So instead of them dropping potions, you can loot monster corpses for ingredients like their meat. Not honey pots or cups of red juice or even bread 'cause I doubt monsters carry that on their persons. Well, humanoid enemies like orcs could carry a honey pot, bread, or herbs. Or you can pick herbs from the field or go rob a beehive. You might end up finding a man-eating plant camouflaged among the harmless or get stung by poisonous bees for your troubles though. Herbs and the bitter medicines you can make from them are one way to flush toxins out of your body, I suppose.

Don't forget about Kenta being a heal-stealer.

Well, cooked food tastes better than just eating their ingredients used to make them, right? So eating a herb would heal much less than drinking a red juice. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

You could also make items that heal you over time (HoT). A 250 HP item could give you the Regeneration status which gives you 50 HP each turn for 5 turns. Herbs might not heal a lot, true, but that means they're more suited to healing you outside of battle than during one. You can also make them cure poison in addition to healing 50 HP. Curing poison isn't directly healing them a lot of HP but poison itself can cause a lot of damage if left unchecked. Red Juice would also probably cure poison if the herbs used to make it can do that. Food doesn't just have to heal in RPGs, some give a temporary boost too.

The way EO's shops work is that they have a limited quantity of items. If you give them enough materials to make 5 Red Juices, then you can only buy 5 Red Juices unless you provide them with more ingredients.

author=Chaos17
Tree is part of the earth element in my game, so you will find Honey pot on Earth monsters.

But... how do the no-armed monsters put honey in pots or carry them? Some trees have sap in them. I suppose you can make maple syrup from that. Berries can be made into jam and that can spread on bread as well. Two different types of bread can heal the same amount. It's just that it might be easier to make one than the other depending on the availability of the ingredients.