Hi!
I'm the guy who made that "When you find out that food heals..." meme on reddit about a sack of delicious potatoes replacing my beloved cleric. Gonna repost a bit of my comments from there, hope that's fine:
For me food does not at all come down to realism or even my desire for a pure 5E ruleset. Instead it comes about because I find it unbalances the rules of the tabletop (and by extent BG3) that impacts my gaming experience in a negative way. I would presume Larian will redesign some key features like "surfaces", the overpowered enemies (yes I can still humblebrag about the fights being easy cause I am a big tactics game nerd but bear with me) and short rests. Maybe by implementing the hit die system already in the tabletop
?
It should also be made clear that Larian implementing custom difficulty settings, like whether food heals or not, would make EVERYONE happy. But I digress!
The issue from a balance perspective comes down to the concept of "infinite out of combat healing". Either through resting or delicious potatoes. THIS is the issue food currently poses in the game. Here's my comment from reddit:
"In 5E "easier" fights are still fights of attrition. Fighting some goblins might only cost you 1 spell slot and 14 hp across the party. But keep on taking such "easy" fights and you're gonna be out of resources come the big scary "deadly" fight.
If you get "infinite" out of combat healing then you never have to use spell slots or rest rechargeable abilites in the "easier" fights as you will recover "infinite" hp afterwards. This means you now get to walk into the boss room at full hp and with all your spells/abilites unused as you could reliably take the damage before and just eat a delicious potato.
Short rests SHOULD NOT be spammable "infinite" healing, but in 5E they're clearly not.
Food is nice to maybe top off healing out of combat but casting "goodberry" or "prayer of healing" are out of combat healing options that now become useless."
So yeah, I WANT to have to bring a dedicated healer with me to be able to heal up between fights. It's totally cool if you don't want that and dislike the idea of having a party spot locked down for mandatory support. But again, Larian seems to have a bit of a split fanbase between the DND5E purists (hello!) and the "but why not just make the game actually fun" crowd. Hoping for custom difficulty settings eventually so I can enjoy my masochistic cleric tendencies. As it is. Healing spells are pretty dang redundant and my beloved cleric is severely crippled as my party gorges themselves on delicious potatoes while I cry in the background wondering why larian let me pick the life domain.
