Pander to a wider audience? Is there a large contingent of folks out there saying things like "You know, I really wasn't too interested in this game, but I turned right around when I heard that you could eat an entire wheel of cheese in the middle of a battle."?
some people want things easy.....some people want Ironman or permanent death mode...most want it somewhere inbetween....
That's what difficulty settings are for. Make things easier/harder by decreasing the difficulty of challenges or adjusting the availability of useful items. Eating food to heal is silly at any difficulty and eating food to heal in the middle of battle is just ridiculous.
