When you enter the world for the first time you don't have a lot of choices, you're most probably bound to eat raw food you find growing somewhere. Raw food gives the least skill points and usually plants don't regrow fast enough to support a large number of players for a long time. So your first way is to build a campfire and cook your first food. For a jumpstart and a good balance I used to build a campfire before even crafting a workbench so I don't need to eat any raw food that lowers my skill point gain on the first day.

In the beginning your choice of food mostly depends on the available ingredients. But as a provisioner you should settle somewhere near a farmer of trust or start with planting your own ingredients. Campfire food gives a good bonus over raw food and should be considered one of your first priorities. With more skill point coming along you'll progress to higher levels of Campfire Cooking quite fast which gives another reasonable boost to your skill point gain.

Always carry a whole meal with you and eat it en bloc when you're hungry. This way you avoid a drop in skill point gain when a single food is removed from your stomach (after 24 hours) leaving an unbalanced diet and you have to wait for some minutes or even hours until the next food is removed that you've eaten to balance out the previous one.
Sometimes it happens to me that I accidentally eat a Camas Bulb or a Bean instead of planting it. Don't try to balance it out (unless these raw foods are a part of your diet anyway). After 24 hours the Bean is gone and balance is restored.

When it comes to the personal diet it usually depends on availability. But as a chef you have the power to provide the best food combos one can get and thus you are responsible for progress on the server. The following table gives an overview which food combos give the highest skill point gain a chef with the respective skill can provide.

The values are based on a default configuration of 12SP Base Skill Gain and a Skill Multiplier of 1.0x. Changing Base Skill Gain and/or Skill Modifier won't change which food combos work best (at least from my experience). I computed these values based on a stomach size of 3000cal which is the start size.

With version 0.9.5 the food variety and food tastiness mechanics are part of the default configuration which makes it impossible to provide the best food combos. However there are still combos that work best in general, and if you take variety and tastiness into account you can reach about the values you had with the old mechanics.

E.g. with the old formula which is still possible to use by switching off food variety and food tastiness in the server config 1 Baked Roast and 1 Huckleberry Pie will give you 84.9 SP per day. With food variety enabled that combo will give you 66.6 SP/day. If food tastiness comes into play and you like the foods you can earn a bonus, If you dislike the food you might want to look for a different combo to not get punished for eating food your character disapproves of.

The general eating strategy is to stay with your favorite combo you choose from the tables below. When you're hungry enough eat the whole combo. As soon as your character craves for a certain food, eat that food first because it gives a really good bonus. Then continue with your normal combo until the next craving appears. By burning a lot of calories and eating a lot of balanced food the single craved for food doesn't unbalance your diet so the more you eat the better your food induced skill point gain will be.

In contrast to the old format of the guide which provided only the best combos under certain circumstances like calorie limit and skill level, this guide now shows the 5 best combinations for each skill or skill combination of Cooking and Baking especially.

The choice of meal should be based on your character's taste. Among the given combos find one where you don't dislike a part of the meal and which is available on the market of course. This is your go-to combo you eat if you don't crave for a certain food. From my experience your character only craves for food they like so you can't really mess up your diet by following a desire for a special food.

The low level combos I provided in former versions of this guide consisted of a lot of different foods. From my experience this is not very useful. Especially in the early game you want to get lots of food fast to build a first base which then helps you to get better foods. Which is why I decided to limt the amount of different foods for the "no skill" section to two. And yes, there are proper combos, even without meat and/or fish.

WIP: Dried Meat/Fish and Sweet Deer Jerky need to be included. I'mm looking for a place to put them but I think I'll go with Campfire Cooking 0 for the dried ones and Campfire Cooking > 0 for Sweet Deer Jerky.

• The guide was first written for 0.7. With 0.8 the levels for a skill are gained with practice. The SP multiplier is taken into account and increases the speed of leveling.
  
• With 0.9.1 the Baking path really got pushed so there is no clear order any more. Up to 0.9 Cooking was clearly better than Baking and Advanced Cooking topped Advanced Baking. Now it's a completely different story. Baking is slightly better than Cooking, Advanced Cooking is slightly better than Advanced Baking, and the best values come from the combination of both paths
  
• Update 0.9.4 really stirred the foods again (horrible pun, I know). And with 0.9.5 the food variety and food tastiness mechanics became default bahviour. So inconsistencies in this guide may occur. Please let me know. If you're able to phrase a polite request your comment won't even be deleted.
  
• Update 10 changed the values Clam Chowder which makes it part of almost every good combo. I think that was not intended. Let's wait for a fix.
  
• Some of the raw foods are harder to get than others. You really should get a campfire soon so you don't have to gather different meal parts only to gain a ridiculous 20something skill points.
  
• The "Pineapple Friend Rice" still has it's name so I assume they did it on purpose and it's not just a typo
  
• To all Smelters: Please sell Cast Iron Stoves so your chef can provide the "better food" you're constantly crying for. Same goes for Kitchens (Carpenters) and Stoves (Advanced Smelters). In 0.8 chefs could also use the anvil for the Cast IIron Stove but at a very high material cost. From 0.9 on chefs depend on smiths again
  
• To know if you like a food or not you need to eat it once. So provisioners should offer all kinds of food, not only those mentioned in the above tables
  
• The next guy asking for an update of the guide 4 hours after release of the new version will just get blocked. FU
  
• I really appreciate how much you all look at this guide, mark it as your favorite and even give me awards for it. Some even link their own approaches or super fancy food calculator websites in the comments. That's great and I think in combination all the resources provide a good base for an efficient Eco experience