Instead of pulling directly from the food bar could you pull from the saturation first, it makes eating impossible if you have the saturation potion effect from something like the environmental controller from rftools after your food is exhausted you cant eat because of a full saturation bar.

As of 0.2.6 the interaction with Saturation is still odd. Saturation should keep your food bar filled, but the Metabolic Generator decreases it in a way Minecraft doesn't seem to notice. You don't take starvation damage while Saturation is active, but taking damage from any other source will trigger Saturation to refill your food bar, so you can avoid loss of food in these circumstances by poisoning yourself. O.o

I've been tricking it by stepping on wooden spikes from extra utilities