Food in Minecraft fulfills hunger and saturation, but even simpler ones can do so very efficiently (steak, golden carrots). So it gets hard to design anything better than them. Here's my take:

Meals are foods prepared from multiple ingredients. They would be very high in hunger and saturation, and sometimes even beyond:

• Stronger meals would provide a Nourished/Energetic status effect, where players are immune to exhaustion. This means they don't spend saturation for things that deplete it normally (run, jump, attack, mine etc);
  • This new effect would be unaffected by milk buckets/bottles;
  • Healing damage, however, would still consume saturation and leave players hungry again. This lets them continue snacking to recover their health, or just leave it alone, as it won't deplete further from exhaustion.
• Meals with more expensive preparations (complex or rare ingredients) would also provide a weak extended potion effect to players, depending on what goes in. For this purpose, I'm considering adding spices as crops, which would be hard to find and cultivate, but would allow for very high-quality meals with unique effects.
• Most meals, but not all, would require wooden bowls to be carried as items. Such meals would stack to 16, and generally be more fulfilling than non-bowl meals. The Cooking Pot can carry and store 64 of them without bowls.

List of planned meals - Google Sheets