Food in Wicked is a weak point of the game and has been since launch. Food art-assets, the campfires, and Gordon’s restaurant are wonderful and should be preserved. However, the system of harvesting, cooking, and healing introduces needless complexity and busywork without a satisfying sense of agency or reward and undermines the game’s roleplaying fantasy.
To begin with, food should be de-coupled from combat healing. There are sufficient resources to always have enough food to heal in combat, provided the player is willing to constantly be picking up mushrooms and shuffling herbs around their inventory. The only constraint is the tedium of interacting with the system. Switching to a flask system would not meaningfully make combat easier or harder, it would just remove an element of busywork that currently feels like a frustrating chore. Beyond that practical aspect, it just feels silly to think that your character is actually horking down gallons of mushroom soup while backpedaling away from a monster.
If food doesn’t provide instant healing, what could it do instead? I propose that campfires and the restaurant are places where you consume ingredients to make and eat a single meal that provides a death-persistent, time-limited buff or modifier to your gameplay. These could be simple enhancements like +Health or +Stamina Gain, or trade-offs (plagued food?). This would make the campfires feel more meaningful, Gordon’s restaurant feel more real, and add to the fantasy of a real-time world. It would also allow there to be fewer gatherable food resources which would make finding one feel more special. This is representative of a broader resource problem in the game, but it’s the best place to start.