Apologies if this has been suggested before. No apologies for the math!
Yesterday, I was doing some seriously energy intensive chefery, fueling my energy needs by just stuffing down facefulls of meat [10 energy]. For the first time ever, I ran into the "you are full" activity cap (the need for which I completely understand).
I thought the solution was to eat fewer units of more energy intensive food. So today, I made a bunch of Divine Crepes [78 energy] (the most high energy food I can make with current skill and reasonable cost). The cost/energy was actually worse than meat, but I didn't mind since I assumed I'd be able to eat 7.8X the amount of total energy. Nope.
I learned that the cap is energy consumed, not food consumed.
I would propose changing this because under the current system, the optimally efficient solution to ones energy needs is to eat raw meat. As such, you remove a great deal of the incentive to make food. This leads to the rather ironic outcome that the only useful functions for food manufacture is for sale to vendors and donation to shrines, but NOT for actual eating.
MATH:
Meat: 10 energy
Harvest (AH 6): 2 energy for 3 meat
AH Purchase: 8 currants (sometimes lower, but that's the vendor buy-back price, which acts as a soft floor)
Harvest return on energy: 15.0
Purchase energy return on currants: 0.8c/energy
Divine Crepes: 78 energy
Harvest (AH 6, A2):
5 grain: 2.2 energy
flour conversion: 2 energy
9 cherry: 7.5 energy
strawberry conversion: 6 energy
2 milk: 2.5 energy
1 butter conversion: 2 energy
2 eggs: 1.67 energy
frying: 5 eenrgy
pan/board wear & tear (approx): 1 energy
total energy: 29.87
Harvest return on energy: ~2.61
AH Purchase (assumes best prices I've seen for the most part, cherries have inflated a lot though)
5 grain (1.5/each): 7.5c
9 cherry (4/each): 36c
2 milk (6/each): 12c
2 eggs (4/each): 8c
Energy for making wheat, strawberries, butter, frying crepes: 14
Net Energy yield: 64
Total cost: 63.5
Purchase energy return on currants: .99c/energy
Conclusion: Whether purchasing the ingredients with currants or with an investment of energy and time by harvesting the raw materials "for free" my optimal decision is to eat meat. When you include the fact that cooking my food requires eating some food for energy to perform the cooking, making me fuller right away, going with the meat option becomes even better, thus rendering the cooking of food for actual eating completely pointless, at least with my current skill set and availability of recipes. Since Divine Crepes is near the top of the list of recipe efficiency, I don't see the economics changing with a different recipe. That goes double when you consider the time investment that goes into preparing food vs. the time it takes to double click a meat stack.