In vanilla fallout, within the first few minutes of the game the meat starts throwing itself at you. Radroaches, molerats, mongrel dogs, all these "tasty" little stimpaks with legs that practically jump into your pockets- so much so that in survival, you can't even begin to carry it all. There's no feeling of scarcity, and you mostly end up just ignoring meat drops.
At the same time, for most of those raw meat items, there's a single, boring, recipe to grill them. Some mods have tried to make cooking more of a crafting system, but they always end leaving the crafting menu (even more of) a confusing mess. In vanilla, for the scant few meats where you actually have a choice about what to cook with it, the options are hidden away, impossible to easily compare, because there are so many useless recipes to grill a hundred different meat types (that you didn't bother to pick up in the first place).
This part of Radfall is based on my mod Feast and Famine.
Generally, things that are trying to kill you don't drop meat, there are only 7 types of raw meat that commonly drop, and have crafting recipes
Squirrel, Iguana, Chicken, Rabbit, Mirelurk (dropped by Hatchlings only), Radstag, and Brahmin.
There are also (chicken) Egg based crafting recipes, and vegetable based crafting recipes.
A bunch of new recipes have been added that allow you to cook those 7 types of meat (as well as some vegetable based recipes) in a variety of different ways and combinations, with a variety of bonuses. Despite fewer types of meat to cook with, there are actually MORE things available to cook in the workbench than there were before.
Some recipes are faction or location specific, and cannot be cooked by the player until you've eaten them at least once, so keep your eyes open for new foods when you visit vendors.
Recipes are sorted into categories by the primary ingrediant, each different protein has it's own category, so it's easy to take a piece of meat to the bench, and see what are the different options that you can cook with it.
Prewar food is the gold standard. It heals more, it heals faster, and it's more valuable, but it comes with the risk that 1 in 10 of them will have triple the rads.
Cooked foods heal an amount based on the ingrediants that go into the recipe, cooking the food increases the healing by lengthening the duration, not by making the effect more powerful.
Cooking doesn't remove radiation from food, prepared foods have the exact same total rads as the ingrediants that go into them, BUT those rads are applied as a DOT instead of all at once, which means that the Lead Belly perk is even more valuable than before.
All food has had it's various properties rebalanced to work together as a system.
"Dirty water" is now just called "Water", it's used for crafting and cooking, and Purified water is now considered a "pre-war tier" item, it's not craftable by the player, and you don't get it from from refilling bottles at a sink, or in the workshop bench just because you have a water purifier.
Water no longer heals the player, instead it grants a small AP buff
Soda no longer heals the player, instead it grants an AP buff (size depends on type)
Sodas and Alcohol now have rads
Lunch boxes now always drop a food item, and a drink.