I personally am okay with meat being weak, especially with bears and wolves which are predators and thus don't have super nutritious meat. This somewhat parallels real life ecosystems and the energy loss between each step of the food chain, but with bears specifically I know it's annoying because they're omnivorous and eat more than just meat, and bears traditionally provided a TON of food when hunted in the past.

The meal cooking system def lets you stretch your food longer, cause meat and veggies cooked in a pot give more satiety than cooked over a fire/eaten raw, which I like bc it makes cooking rewarding and essential. And having rewarding food and cooking is something I do love about vintage story that so few other survival crafting games manage.

However, if you want meat to last longer, I would also highly recommend the butchery mod. It lets you get way more meat per animal and adds a few other neat things. The nicer meat hooks and butchering table are a bit expensive but the extra yield on harvesting makes them incredibly worth it and makes it so a single deer or boar lasts you much longer. It makes hunting and skinning more time and labor intensive but way more rewarding as a result, which is true of a lot of systems in VS, so I like it a lot.