I Have a Big Beard

Silly question - is it different from just dropping the meat on the ground outside? I've been playing a good bit but never at levels or situations where I took much note of the differing behaviour between where I store my stuff.

There are probably a lot of small tweaks that could be made in order to keep the late game interesting. To build upon making wildlife less predictable, perhaps a more subtle approach would be that wildlife can't respawn (or has dramatically slowed respawn?) while you're in that region. There's a lot of knobs that can be tweaked here, I feel. It can be as generous as "you have to at least flip flop between two areas" to "you should routinely be on the move and keep track of where you've been otherwise you might be in trouble" depending on the balance between respawn time and amount of food you can get. I also agree with starvation tech being too strong. Prior to learning about it, I was devoutly keeping Well Fed going and felt legitimately crushed and concerned if I let it drop. When I learned of it... it felt a bit... "gamey", if that makes sense. Like abusing a mechanic that isn't quite baked all the way. I'll admit that I do it because it makes things dramatically easier but it shouldn't be a long term strategy, IMO. If we're making the real life comparisons, you can get away with a little starvation here and there (due to having extra energy in fat, and in muscle for true desperation) but there's a limit to that and your ability to do much would be severely hindered after a while. I like the idea about the calorie store being much larger, but with bigger penalties for running out. Another option could be broadening the Fatigue-impacting "affliction" to have more repercussions and also behave more like Cabin Fever - being starved more than fed as an average over time would cause some sort of detriment til you balance it the other way. Ultimately I think getting so comfortable to the point of discussing these options for Interloper is definitely a fringe issue where you've probably mastered the game beyond its intended scope so it might not be worth pursuing too much, however there is probably some room to make things a bit more dynamic without impacting that long term feeling of "making it" in a good sandbox.