this thread is about our choices about sim food; what we feed our sims, what our sims cook, etc.


main times my sims eat are these::
-birthday parties (mostly Baby to Toddler); the birthday cake.
-when they have a Want for some specific food; the Want's food.
-Welcome Wagon

main times my sims cook are these::
-mentioned Wants
-Welcome Wagon; sim with highest Cooking, foods with lowest risk of cooking failure.
-when they have a Want to increase Cooking; sim with the Want, foods with lowest risk of cooking failure.

My lazy sims opt more for tv dinners, food enthusiast sims will 'make meals' for fun like cheesecake, crepes, etc. At least one sim in the house will learn the grandma's chicken soup recipe to ward off any flu or cold symptoms that could arise. Like you, I will try to have them cook things they roll wants for. When they are having large get-togethers or when the headmaster is visiting the sim with highest points will be serving food. It's very annoying when the server comes out with burnt food, I just have them dispose of it and start over with something easier.

I am also pretty mindful of foods vs seasons. For example, I don't have them make chile con carne in the summer because it's too hot - they go for more cook-out dishes like hambergurs and then cold foods like salads or lunch meat sandwiches. In the winter they cook more 'hot meals' like spaghetti and mac n cheese.

Most of my sims can cook and I like them to cook varied items. I have a lot of custom foods. There is always plenty of open sandwiches and soups. Coral Bay is a fishing town so seafood features quite a lot as well. A few of my sims are vegetarian so they only make vegetarian dishes.

Mostly, my sims eat only when they absolutely have to (mainly just for pictures). Occasionally birthday/wedding cakes, maybe a downloaded quick-meal of some sort, but other than that they eat very rarely, thanks to maxmotives. Toddlers and babies mostly get bottles, usually the never-ending, never-spoiling kind. The headmaster, if he ever visits, gets lobster every time, because I can't be bothered to have him over more than once per set of kids.

My sims eat daily; I have lots of custom foods so I want to use them, plus it gives a more real experience. They don't have a set schedule, though; they eat whenever they're hungry. Usually, I try to get one sim to cook for the whole household so they eat together, but they don't always. Usually I have one sim per household who is a reasonable good cook, just so they can have variety and decent meals. In rich households, though, I employ servos do all the cooking. Though toddlers can eat solids in the high chair, I prefer to go with bottles because it's easier

My Sims follow the same rules as my Real Life family - breakfast and lunch might be a grab'n'go, but the evening meals are a time where everyone sits down at the dinner table and eats/talks/sometimes argues together. I try and vary the evening meal, and I almost always give all adult Sims lots of cooking points, because it drives me mad when they can only make low-value foods and then they're hungry an hour later. The only strict rule I follow is that every time I start a new household, or the Sims move into a new place, they ALWAYS have spaghetti for dinner. Spaghetti just strikes me as the sort of easy, throw-together kind of meal you'd prepare if you'd just moved into a new place and were busy unpacking and settling in. Nobody ever moved into a new place and, amongst all the crap and packing boxes, decided that they'd throw together a quick roast turkey or baked Alaska.

Depends on the sim, but they all eat properly. I got tons of custom foods that I want them to use. The Mayor's hobby is cooking, and she has a butler, so the fridge is overfilled with the most delicious meals and pastries and cakes. Unfortunately this means that she always eats leftovers and never gets to indulge her cooking hobby that much. The farmer new girlfriend is a highly skilled cook as that's the job she had when he moved her in. Since he grows everything fresh, they eat well morning and evening. All my sims eat two meals a day, but what the eat depends on who they are. My ranching twins usually eat steak or some type of meat. The downtown mechanics favour paella, and those that have toddlers usually go for some type of pasta dish, teens choose hamburgers, hot dogs or sometimes pizza. I really like when they go visiting friends and come back with a wish to bake a cake or meal that they were given. Not gonna happen, you is level 2 and that cake is level 7 and by the time you get enough skill you will have forgotten and be asking for a pinball machine instead.

Some of my sims seem to want to cook and eat grilled cheese sandwiches all the time, I wonder why that is... Really, though, it depends on their tastes and eating habits (actual ones or how I envision them). Some sims feel like the kind to have a bag of cookies for dinner, others do not. Or, for the gourmet version: glace a four or cheesecake for dinner. And I look at wishes too (the ham sandwich seems to be popular amongst children), or I'll see what they cook autonomously - one guy often makes salmon, another one appearently likes cutlets. I wish there were more vegetarian options included in the game, but sometimes I'll pretend it's soy hotdogs, burgers etc. that they're eating.
For households with more than one person, I like to have them eat together for as many meals as possible. And I like to have my single sims cooking for their friends/guests, too. I have one family where everyone wake up really early in the morning, so I'll have someone make breakfast and then they all sit and talk and eat together while it's still dark outside, it looks so chill and pleasant.
I use the left-over-function a lot as well, both for when sims are in a rush or just not in the mood for cooking, and so that children can have something other than just a snack for when their parents aren't available to make something for them, like early mornings when they're still asleep.

I don't know why, but my Sims' hunger depletes so slowly. One day I may try to mod it and make it much higher, but motive-editing is complicated so we'll see if I get around to it. But because it goes down so slowly, most Sims only need to eat once a day, if that. I really dislike that they eat at work, because that makes it so that they sometimes don't need to eat at all. They also rarely roll wants to eat or cook things, so I go with what I think suits them most of the time.

Sometimes I use testingcheats to pull their hunger down manually so they eat breakfast and dinner at least, but it depends. What they eat varies a lot from Sim to Sim. Sims with high body skill will eat more filling things, as I imagine they need it, and if they have a high interest in fitness as well I make it be more healthy filling things. Sims that I perceive as lazy and uninterested in cooking will do simple things like mac and cheese and noodles. Teens tend to eat more fast food-type items, because most teens I've seen tend to gravitate towards that. Kids eat whatever their parents prepare for them, unless they decide to make a muffin for themselves. Because I personally always hated fish, I rarely make my Sims feed their kids fish, but other than that it depends on the family. Poorer families are more likely to do mac and cheese and spaghetti, and richer families are more likely to do pork chops. Almost all of them will prepare some lunch-meat sandwiches that are kept as leftovers, so that the kids can grab it as snack if they are hungry and everyone is busy or at work.

If my Sims celebrate Christmas, they usually have turkey and some kind of dessert. We don't do turkey for Christmas where I live, but what we have isn't available so I do turkey anyway. It looks more festive than the other things. For birthday parties the uninterested/poor families will usually have the buyable birthday cake. Richer/food-loving families will blow out the candle on the bought one, and then quickly get rid of it and instead have a baked cake or cheesecake. For weddings Sims usually go for the buffet-table.

For regular parties most Sims order pizza or chinese food. I would like to use the platters from the cuisine hobby, but visitors hardly ever grab plates from them and instead raid the fridge for chips and juice so I stopped trying. I go for pizza/chinese food because to me a party is not the time to go whip up a baked salmon, or a salad. You want to have fun, and quick easy greasy food is more suitable for that.

One of my Sims runs a take-out restaurant where she sells all the Maxis dishes, prepared with Seasons produce so it's sparkly. It's costly, but Sims who can't or don't want to cook will sometimes go pick something up for more special occasions. It's also how everyone gets access to Grandma's soup, in case they get sick.

No custom food in my game. While I find the idea nice, the fact that they can't be removed once added is a deal-breaker for me. It also annoys me that they always place themselves first in the make one/many menu from OFB. So I stick to the Maxis things

@gummilutt I love your idea to drag down the hunger manually! This will come in handy for handling meals with several courses!

My sims get fed when they are hungry and since I'm a glutton in real life, "hungry" means the hunger bar is about halfway filled. If a sim is low on aspiration points I might go with a food want (if one is there), in any other case I go by the time of day and the culture the household belongs to. Especially in large 'hoods some stereotyping ("Desideratans really dig non-inflammable cc icecream" or "On their homeplanet Anunnaki peasants needed to eat everything they could grab, so they have no patience for sophisticated recipes") is much easier than keeping track of each sim's personal eating habits.

I'm most conscious about what the sims eat in non-standard households. The nuclear winter 'hood, lots that are supposed to be traveling (sheepherds, the orient express or emigrant ships) as well as my assorted prisons/labor camps are way more monitored when it comes to what they should realistically have available. But, again, this is more a global/group approach than taking into account individual sims.

When grabbing leftovers from the fridge I often do not care about the time of day. Yesterday's spaghetti bolognese for breakfast? Sure, go on. You just moved into a house that wasn't inhabited for like 30 years? Go on, have a bite of the lobster thermidor that's still in the fridge!

For birthdays I use the cake about half of the time. Some families in my poorer 'hoods cannot even afford it and have to go with a cheap deep frozen cc tartlet, others only use it because it's traditional but they also want to serve something more special.

I forgot to mention that I do that as well, Enki, thanks for reminding me I always make use of the cheat for things like Christmas dinner, where I want Sims to have a main course and dessert. I suppose there are mods one could use as well, I go with testingcheats because it's permanently on in my game so I can just click the bar at my leisure.

Platinum reminded me of something else I do nowadays regarding food. In the past, I would religiously store leftovers, and often have a cooking-marathon one day and fill up the fridge with tons of prepared food. But the longer I play the less I like this approach. The reason the slow hunger depletion bothers me is because I like simulating life as it really is, where you eat three times a day (or two at least). It also started bothering me that Sims so rarely have to cook. Parents should have to make dinner for their kids every day, that's part of taking care of them. So now I sometimes use mods to limit serving plate size to however many Sims are in the household, and I am much less likely to store leftover food. It depends on the Sim, and the household. If there are things making that household difficult then they are allowed to store food (pregnant sims, or my farm which is insanely busy always), and if there are kids they get to have some food for the kids. I'm also more lenient with breakfast-foods, since Sims have less time in the morning. But for the rest of the household I try to make them have to cook once a day at least. Cook, or buy food, whatever suits them.

It seems kind of strange to me that I enjoy things more the more mundane they are, but that's how it is. I'm sick of cooking myself, but watch Sims cook and clean and do chores? Yes please!

Gosh, thanks for posting that! This thread has made me realize how dissatisfied I am with how I handle sims' meals. The thing is, back when I was first starting to play the game, I found information on what meals cost to make and how much hunger they satisfy, and because I saw that spaghetti, mac and cheese, cereal or toaster pastry, and lunch-meat sandwiches were the five most cost-efficient (cheapest relative to how much they filled sims up), I got in the habit of just having sims make those. (In my defense, since I was just learning to play, I was trying to reduce the number of things I had to think about. But yes, I can be obsessive about efficiency!)

Since I got Seasons included in my game setup, I've been using leftovers all the time. So now everyone's fridge is filled with leftovers of those same 5 foods, lol. And fish dishes. (Except for some who don't cook and have few Food interest points---they buy premade sparkly turkey, pork chops, and salmon from the sim-owned deli, because those are profitable.) And because I could now do leftovers, I largely stopped using Neder's Variable Meal Serving controllers , which I'm guessing is the hack you mean, the one that changes the number of food servings. I thought leftovers made the VMS obsolete.

Now I see that I was too hasty there.

I've always been afraid of custom foods because I know they mess up want trees if you ever remove them. But I could certainly stand to have my sims eating more of a variety of the Maxis foods, at least. Reading about your thought process has made me realize that I can get family dinners back (and create more opportunities to make varied dishes) by again restricting the number of dishes made when Serve is used. Leftovers tend to push me to have sims eat just when they are hungry, which often means alone. (That idea about dragging hunger bars down is great too!)

In fact...I've also been wanting to install Cyjon's Smarter Food Serving, but I've not wanted to risk messing up fridge leftovers, as he mentions can happen. Now I'm realizing that it's my existing, monotonous leftovers that are keeping my sims stuck in an eating pattern that isn't so rewarding for me. So if I do lose some, I think that will be just fine.

So thank you. I'm rather excited now about getting a new lease on sim eating!

I do not have Smarter Food Serving and my sims never served a plate for a baby or a toddler on the table? Reading what that mod does, don't seem to be for me.
I take advantage of seasons a lot. All my sims have a garden, a pond. Their fridge is filled up with harvestable and fish. Every meal sparkles They also drink juice, sometimes more often than meals.

I don't know how gummilutt has a slow hunger depletion rate when all my sims need to eat 3-4 times per day. Mine need a bowl of cereal in the morning then like around 2 they'll need a lunch meat sandwich and then like spaghetti/mac N cheese once or twice depending on how depleted they are from work. even with high cooking skill it never seems to fill them up no matter what they cook.

I used to have a ton of custom meals but got rid of them all last install. I decided that after spending 3 minutes going through the pie menus to decide on the meal that it was becoming more of a hindrance than a added bonus.

For those of you who max motive hunger do you still build a kitchen in the home? or would that space become added bedroom or something?

Good to know! Yes, I'm not sure whether I have the problem of the babies and toddlers, but I know that my sims will try to serve for sleeping sims, plantsims, and so on. I also don't prefer the bit where cooks take their own plate when they are not actually hungry, even though they were the one I needed to cook the meal because of their skill level. So I'm looking forward to having them just serve for who's actually going to eat. I can still sit them down at the table with the family---and just as easily as if I had to cancel out their unwanted eating action.

Ah, I knew there was another mod I'd had in mind too; it's Monique's over at Insim. That one only serves for sims with hunger below 50% on the lot. Two to test out, yay!

By the way, my plan is to have them finish most of those leftovers autonomously. Somewhere, I found a copy of dizzy's (I think?) Have a Leftover, and it works just like I hoped---forces any sim autonomously heading to prepare food to get out a leftover instead. With controlled sims you get a dialog so you can still pick what they eat (they just get the surprise of suddenly having a prepared dish in hand, not a tray of raw food). And I just discovered last night that it even stops some party guests, forcing them to get a leftover too (with no dialog); one guest went to the fridge when the served gelatin ran out and magically got a sandwich in hand. Would provide a link, but I think it took some digging and I can't remember now where I finally unearthed it. If I find it again, I'll come back and edit to give that link.

Still pretty excited about this new lease on food...

EDIT: I found a zip "dump" file of all dizzy's most updated mods, including the version of Have a Leftover that I'm using with no issues in the UC. With a separate link to documentation, even! I've posted it on the Look What I Found Thread so it's more obvious to folks.

Active Sims eat more than lazy Sims in my game, and Sims who exercise a lot also eat more. No worries here, since I like them all to have cuisine as one of their hobbies (since they have to eat, and it gives them something to talk about to others too).

It varies a lot by household. A poor family may never fix breakfast, so the kids will eat at school, working parents at work, and any stay-at-home members will snack or have lunch, often on leftovers, and then serve a full dinner, carefully hoarding leftovers as soon as everyone's taken a plate. If money is very tight indeed they might even go out to eat free hot dogs at a park in the evening! A rich family (the Manns of Widespot in particular) will serve three full meals and never put back leftovers, because the maid will clean them up. A college household may have a designated cook based on who needs a cooking point to pass the semester, who cooks for everybody, including parties; or they may only serve meals when they have visitors, with each member of the household making his or her own meal whenever they happen to be hungry. If someone in a household really likes to cook, that person gets to cook almost all the meals. The person who called a party may make the refreshments for it (I have custom foods like canapes and appetizers that can make up for the fact that guests ignore the cheese platters; you can also turn the fridge around so people have to eat what's set out) or may serve a buffet, depending on circumstances. I never order pizza or chinese, but store a lot of pizza in the inventories of my Greek university students, so they can pull it out in an emergency, like when the pregnant lady is redlining hunger or they just called a party and discover that the fridge is empty.

I like custom foods and try to make use of them, but I downloaded a few too many, and for parties especially I prefer to choose ones I know have the "call to meal" option on them - not all of them do. I also like to serve the highest-valued food available from a particular cook for visitors. Certain kinds of visitors cry out for certain kinds of meals - when the family comes over for Sunday dinner, the traditional thing to serve them is fried chicken! Other options, if the cook is good enough, include Sunday Dinner Soul Food, meat loaf, and baked ham. If the gathering is big enough - say the Hawkinses of Drama Acres, or the Lands of Widespot - dinner will consist of an entree and a dessert, so everybody gets to eat something. The Montys of the GS Uberhood serve a lot of Italian food. The Ianas of Drama Acres eat more Mexican food. I need more low-level Indian food so the Patels and Ramaswamis can have more of a taste of the old country. I don't think I've ever had a sim serve lobster thermidor - that's restaurant food. Turkey, sure, if there's enough people to justify it. Sparkly fish is reserved for large gatherings, and for families that are hoarding leftovers (they'll even stop with the plate half-gone if they get full, and put it back) for lean times or for pregnant ladies.

And lastly there's the weather and the setting. Weekend mornings call for pancakes and waffles, especially when it's cold out. Weekdays in summer are cold cereal or fruit, but in colder weather are likely to be egg dishes or hot cereal - oatmeal in places/families that code more "northern" to me, grits in ones that code "southern." In the hot desert summers of Strangetown, Viper Canyon, and LFT, people eat a lot of peaches and yogurt, cereal, and fruit salad for breakfast. Rainy days call for soup for lunch, sunny ones for sandwiches, or even juice if there's a gardener on the lot. Dinners in summer tend to be lighter - linguini al pesto instead of spaghetti, shrimp instead of steak. I have a couple of lovely garden quiches that are strictly summer fare, zuchinni and spinach ricotta, because summer is when I would eat those dishes.

Although, as a vegetarian myself, I download as many vegetarian dishes as I can find, I don't designate any sims as vegetarian. It'd be too hard to feed them properly, and they'll be eating meat autonomously on community lots and during visits regardless. But sims who garden a lot are more likely to serve vegetarian options than meat-based meals, even when grilling at a park. How you grill falafel on an open park grill I don't know, but they manage.

I copied from someone (Strange Tomato, maybe) that aliens cannot eat meat. So if they're eating hotdogs, they have to be those fake-tofu-dog things. Most of their meals they're more sensible about, though. There are so many interesting and delicious things one can do with vegetables, why pay extra for fake meat?
I try to feed most families all together, if the parents' work schedules allow. Families that don't eat together tend to have worse relationships because they don't get that slow, steady point or five a day boost from talking over breakfast and dinner.

There are probably 5 leftover mods, each having different drawbacks.
Dizzy, Ancient Highway (both archived @ Simbiology), MogHughson's Autonomous Leftover's and her Simply Leftovers which has does single plates. Boiling Oil's Food Dish Autonomy specifically works well on Dorm lots instead of forcing Uni Students to want to put away the slops the canteen cook puts out. BO's mod prevents sims throwing away pefectly good half eaten plates.

NB: Boiling Oil is also the only creator still active. But after reading the drawbacks and features I picked the MogHughson autonomy version.

Agreed, Diovanlestat, on that good list.

I do feel I should say that I've had difficulty with leftovers autonomy in using both Mog's and BO's versions, so now I only use Mog's Simply Leftovers, to get the single-plate option but without autonomy.

What didn't work for me about leftovers autonomy? Well, one thing I like to do is set out platters of gelatin at parties. I have the sims serve the gelatin, and if there's a big crowd, I'll set out a second plate of it too and let them have at that when they polish off what's already dished out. With leftover autonomy, they start putting away the served gelatin plates and platters before guests had a chance to eat. With BO's version specifically, it also prevented them cleaning up plates with green, stinky food on them---I guess because they still saw it as a plate with food. In fact, I sometimes lost all options completely on green-clouded plates with food still on them.

I liked so many features of BO's mod that for a while I just used Pescado's Stuck Object Remover on all such untouchable stinky plates. But that just got too cumbersome, so finally I pulled the mod altogether, with regrets. I'd love to know if others don't completely lose the option to tell them to clean up stinky plates of food.

(In case anyone is wondering how I get party and regular guests to eat what I've served and not try for the fridge anyway, TwoJeffs has two fine mods that work together for that: Food Already Available and Visitor Snacking Fix. Those make it so that they recognize the food already out and do not go to pull instant meals and such out of the fridge...unless they are still hungry and your served food has all been eaten. I like the extra realism of it---make the effort to feed them, and they won't raid the fridge themselves.)

Bit more fully on topic and back to what I was saying last time I was in this thread: I was playing Bianca and Pascal Curious, who are honeymooning on Twikki (the three-deck version of these is their vacation rental home that I set up for them; lovely views!). I restarted usage of a Variable Meal Server on the lot, having them make every meal as only 2 servings, just for them, with food made fresh every meal. No leftovers, and I loved it! It really brought some life back to the sim eating ritual for me. (And they had to make food often; Bianca got pregnant their first day, lol.)

So at this rate, I probably don't need to test smart-serving hacks at all. Making only the number of servings I need to feed everyone who will be sitting down is...smart enough. So grateful to the folks in this thread for inspiring this change in play for me!

I find sims putting away food that I don't want put away. I'm like no, I just had you make that,your brother/sister is coming to eat dang it! I don't think there is any perfect put away meal mod because sims can't be controlled to that point.

about sims wanting grilled cheese; Night Life's Grill Cheese aspiration might be one possible explanation.

about slow Hunger depletion; according to the base game Prima Guide, Lazy decays slower and Active faster.