Why do you hate the idea of food so much? I don\'t think anyone is suggesting that you\'ll have to spend an hour cooking three times every in-game day. Good way to implement hunger, IMO: if you don\'t eat every so often (say, every few RL hours), you start regaining health and stamina more slowly; if you don\'t eat for a long time, your health and stamina start decreasing slowly and your stats become temporarily lowered (until you eat again). Easy-to-forage fruits keep you sated for less time than harder-to-find plants/critters, and cooked food keeps you full even longer.
Food seems important because it seems (at least to me, an admitted total noob) that exploration will be a big part of the game. Having to manage depeletable resources is an important to the challenge of exploring the trackless depths. Sure, an overemphasis on \"realism\" would take a lot of fun out of the game, but a little more realism than a standard hack\'n\'slash dungeon crawl wouldn\'t be bad, I think.
