Early game food tips?

[Carnage]

I seem to have done something wrong, as I have entered a Exhausted > Rest > Hungry/Starving loop that I cannot get out of.. Any tips?

I will say that I think the stamina system is garbage and needs to be either overhauled or removed entirely.

[AvG]

very early on your stamina is going to be terrible for everyone but here are some tips after trying a lot of things out.
after you unlock enough of the tutorials, around the point you get the ability to craft a pickaxe you can make sure you have weight training skill and mining skill trained. Then risk rushing caves or mountains maps during your 90 day trial period to find stone piles which are breakable with your starter axe. Specifically looking for Basalt stones. They are slightly black and look like a little pile of round rocks. You will need two of these to help craft a good pickaxe. Then you can go buff up your mining potential at the trainer and start strip mining the puppy cave.

Soil blocks are easy to break and there is a small chance of a gold bar being inside them. At the same time you get encumbered fairly quickly. When encumbered your weight training increases, your endurance increases, and your strength increases, especially when mass mining. This is probably the most effective way to raise stamina besides farming but farming has a lot of extra steps. For strip mining you can just manage your backpack so you don't become over encumbered too much.

One very good thing besides having high mining skill and hefty endurance/stamina that comes with it it grants access to a lot of things people struggle with, like getting a stone or wooden house much easier because you can actually lift and mine it all. Also precious gems everywhere.

Also make sure anatomy is trained since that will help with not farming so much. You can clear out other caves/dungeons and sell everything to buy food instead at shops too.

[Ostrava of Boletaria]

My advice is go to a town, find an inkeeper and buy all of their food rations. They're really cheap, fill a lot of hunger and never expire. They're also used automatically on the overworld when you need to eat so they basically solve all your hunger problems (though keep in mind it's still important to look into cooking because actual cooked food boosts stat potentials which is where a lot of your strength comes from)

[Shard]

Food rations are a bad choice, as they do nothing to improve stats. I recommend visiting the eight tiles surrounding your base and spending all your stamina scavenging them. Berries don't last long, but you can cook them for more nutrition and to make them last longer. Api nuts last bloody forever. While clearing the zones, you will likely have to fight a few times, and may pick up corpses, which can be cooked into meals as well, offering much better stat boosts. You can also find mushrooms and pick those as well.

While doing so, be sure to grab all the flowers, as those sell very well in the shipping crate, and can easily pay off your taxes at the start. And every so often, an earthquake will happen while you are at home and reset all the random maps so you can go back to new zones in the same place.

[Akameka]

enter any world map and forage mushrooms, fruits, berries... anything that can be eaten and eat them raw. Obviously it's better cooked, but only if you have the cooking skill, which not all characters have at start.

Do the puppy quest so you get the mini-fridge which allows to carry around up to 9 different food items without them spoiling away

Avoid rations if possible, except for fast travel. Yes they are cheap, but they do not help your character grow in stats