People are hungry while food is available

I've noticed, that sometimes in Frostpunk I have a warning about hungry (or even starving) people, even while I have processed (cooked) food available. When I've tried to find those hungry people, they were at work, in the fighting arena or doing anything other than actually feeding themselves.

I usually build only one cookhouse, since it is so efficient and I can usually process easily all raw food into the processed one - but is the cookhouse the problem here? Do people go there to eat and my workaholics were starving because they couldn't find a room?

Solution 1:

I've found more information in the Frostpunk Wiki

Frostpunk's citizens have a priority list, and eating isn't very high on that list unless they are starving. Priorities are, from highest to lowest:

• build Streets,
• build Buildings,
• dismantle buildings,
• go to work,
• go to eat,
• go to work.

If a person is trying to eat, but there is a task of higher priority on their to-do list, they will forgo eating and instead go to complete the task you've set for them. "Go to work" is listed twice, because its priority changes depending on whether someone is eating on the way to/from work or whether they were ripped from a different task

Further on, the Cookhouse has a limit of 250 people:

People eat Food Rations at the Cookhouse, regardless of whether it is turned on or off, heated, or even connected to roads, so long as you have Food Rations available in your inventory. People must walk to and from the cookhouse to eat. Furthermore, Cookhouses have an internal queue that limits how many citizens they can serve. This queue holds approximately 250 people at one time, per Cookhouse. This means that if you have too many people queuing for food at the same time, they may forgo eating even if you have enough food to serve them.

So the soulution seems to be "reduce building in the off-time and build more cookhouses" (and possibly leave the off)