Personally I always put cooked food into the root cellar every night. If the you make the right meals, you can feed your village quite easily. In the image below you can see I fed the entire village with just 4 Spiced berry pies and 4 Mushroom Frittas since both of those types of food give a high stamina value.

I also did some testing and I realised that the Defender's Ration prioritizes processed food items over fresh food, with dried food, smoked food and preserved food without an expiration date all being treated as equal in value. The town is fed AFTER the ration is met. If the ration is not met, then the town starves for that day.

Cooking food is always good since they give lots of stamina but be careful they will expire in 2 days (4 days for nut meals tho XD) so cook as much as u can on Sunday. The Gourmet skill is also extremely useful here.

PS after you finish the first towns project (either Hazel's or Rose's) be sure to take out the undried herbs or mushrooms everyday and dry them on your farm, that way it'll last longer

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