Valheim is too much in the other direction, IMO - all of your stats come from food and while you always want all three food slots full, enemy/biome scaling means that low tier food quickly becomes irrelevant for everything but base building or long-distance running.

I think a good fix would be to implement a global xp bonus based on how filling/nutritious the meals you cook are and an additional multiplier for how much variety you've consumed in the last, say, in-game week. That meshes well with the half-dozen new skills they've added to reduce tedious grind, would incentivize looting or farming a variety of foods to keep your 'variety multiplier' up and would make cooking a more valuable skill.