i think the game requires too much eating and food prep, and a ratio more similar to everyday life would be much more appealing. if i'm having a day with a lot of strenuous activity, i might eat slightly more than normal, but not 5 to 10 times more like i do in glitch. in real life, about 30 minutes of food prep and eating provides for about 4 to 5 hours of activity, no matter what activity i'm doing. so long as glitch keeps to this sort of ratio, i think playing the game will be much less frustrating. this could be 30 minutes in one go, or in 6 five minute spots throughout 4 hours, you get the idea.
i guess the problem with that idea is that it would become very, very easy to do certain tasks at an industrial scale, like mining, when that really shouldn't be the case.
there are a lot of ways to skin that cat. there's already friction preventing industrial scale activity, in that actions already require time via progress bars, which already restrict massive resource exploitation or overproduction. adding energy as further friction is more annoying than necessary.
but where it *is* necessary i really like the teleportation cool down as a model. you could have a mining cool down, fruit changing cool down and so on. these cool down timers could be API accessible like the skills timers are, which could be interesting for activities with really, really long cool down times [an app could send you a notification when the cool down is over]. you could build "once per day" activities quite easily using this model.
i suppose the problem with cool downs is that they prevent industrial production entirely. you can't pack a large number of energy consumables to fuel a mining rampage, for example. but i think the less frustrating answer to that is probably more like mining machines that drain currants as they run [representing electricity?], and have much reduced cool down times or can run for longer before they hit cool downs. plus machines like that would look awesome.