Originally posted by hand_sanitizzzzer:

Honestly? Post-H&H got... Overly complicated. Feature bloated. Unnecessarily complex. I liked how it was before, but now, they kind of just added an extra inconvenience to the game. It's not harder or anything, it's just more annoying.

most of which you can just ignore.
you only need to build and upgrade cauldron to gain access to the next tier of food and meads. and on almost each tier you have you have the same food, just with stronger numbers. (you can even survive with lower tier food cuz the difference is 5hp/tier only)