12 is brutal. Cooking for blockheads adds a lunchbox that can hold 6 types of foods even.

That is a bit too rough for adventuring and trying to maintain food at the same time.

I'm not really sure what to do about the defaults. They are rather arbitrary currently, and I've never been really happy with them, but the mod has always been primarily intended to be configured, so I've never bothered to mess with them. Weirdly enough, bad defaults might actually be somewhat of a good thing--it encourages people to modify the settings.

EDIT: It might be good to include multiple different 'defaults' that can be easily selected between (would need to add support for the in-game config GUI).

Support for the in-game config GUI would be awesome, even if I have to exit my world to make changes to stuff like the diminishing returns formula. Because of my number of mods a complete restart is very slow :( and when I'm trying to rejigger things that's just painful.