If only the wood cooking rack is available, cooking is a no-brainer. One cannot eat raw meat and meat is the only thing one can cook. Unless one wishes to be a vegetarian viking, one must cook.

Once the Cauldron comes into play, the cooking question becomes more complex. Cooking in a cauldron has three major advantages to raw foods:

1) A cooked food gives a viking more combined health and stamina points than any single one of its raw components;

2) The healing rate of a cooked food (2 hit points per tick) is double that of any raw food; and,

3) Except for the various jerkies, cooked foods have a duration of 300 seconds more than any raw food.

I have seen complaints posted that consuming a cooked food gives a lower combined total of hit points and stamina points than consuming one of each of its raw components. Consuming one each of those raw components requires two of three available eating slots. Consuming one cooked food only requires one slot. Consuming any one of the raw components in a second slot will result in more combined hit and stamina points than the two raw components. That is before one even considers the increased healing rate and the increased duration of the food buff.

Of course one may disagree with the overall balance between raw and cooked foods. If one fails to consider all three advantages of cooked food, one's argument will be as weak as a viking who only eats to fill one of the three available slots.