Hunger is a pointless mechanic

Hunger is an ancient mechanic from the birth of the survival genre, it's been tackled on every game since, it works in some hardcore survival games but since food scarcity is not an issue even when you start up the game for the first time, it's only purpose is to be annoying.

As far as I know, Valheim was the first survival game that came up with the idea of buffs instead of hunger, and since then new survival games have adopted that mechanic. You have chosen to have both, and by doing that made the buffs even worse since you have to replenish your hunger gauge with either eating or potions, making the longer food buffs pointless since you have to eat long before they expire. Now I understand there is hunger potions available, but that just adds a pointless fix to a pointless mechanic, which is hunger.

If you feel like hunger must stay, implement food buff to reduce hunger gain on all foods, preferably so it scales with the food duration.