All recipes should used cooked meat.

I am like a doomsday prepper in Valheim, so I have chests of food and materials ready to go at all times. I was organizing my food/ingredient chests and restocking them today when I realized there's a bit of an oddity among meat and their respective recipes:

Not all recipes use raw meat.

Deer meat can make deer stew, but it must be cooked first whereas turnip stew can only use raw boar meat. Serpent meat, fish, and deer can only be used once cooked. This is a weird arbitrary decision that some recipes use raw meat and some use cooked meat, which doesn't make sense in a game built around preparation and progression.

Let's say I'm a new player and I've been slaughtering boars like they did wrong against the family. I have mountains of boar meat, and I say, 'Yes, I have a half hour to kill, let's cook it all!' Preparation is good right? It's good to have extra food in storage when you need to quickly refill. But then I go to the swamps and find these turnip seeds and… wait a minute, now I can make better food with my boar meat.

Oh, but I already cooked it all… so it's… useless to me now. This is a weird decision in a progression based game. Take raspberries, for example. You find them in the meadows, and they can be eaten straight away or you can use them in recipes and get something better out of them. Endgame foods should get more complex and require more steps than early game food. I imagine that once the newer biomes are introduced, maybe we will have recipes that use 2 different kind of meats, even. Same with carrots, onions and honey; you can eat them raw or use them for something better. Locking the cooked boar, wolf, lox, and neck meat from being used in anything else is a weird decision.

Lox Meat Pies, for instance, are currently an endgame food. So the progression should be Lox Meat (step 0), then cooked Lox Meat (Step 1), then unbaked Lox Meat Pie (+ingredients, Step 2), then Lox Meat Pie (+materials, Step 3).

So, all recipes should use the cooked version of their respective meats. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.