More Awesome Than You!

Quick question: if it's either out (on tables) or stored in fridge as leftovers, will deleting custom food from outside the game break anything? I can just make them eat/compost the leftovers and then exit and delete the files, but it would be quicker to do it externally. Plus, it would be nice to know if anyone has any idea about this (for future reference) :)

(I ask this because I know furniture will harmlessly replace itself with whatever it was cloned from, I just don't know if food will be different from furniture in this case.)

Nothing will break, as far as I have seen.

The food will turn into Maxis food, if it was properly made by the creators. There is a very tiny chance that a creator did something horribly wrong, so I recommend keeping the food files on your computer until you have verified that everything is okay, rather than permanently trashing the files. But, this is true for deleting practically any custom object. 99.9% of the time everything is fine, but you don't want to be hit by that 0.01%.

The food, once it becomes Maxis food, may or may not be still usable. Probably you will have to trash it. Same with food in inventory.

When I did it, the deleted food turned into empty plates, non usable, but the sims could still clean them. I also cleared the sims memories (learned to cook).

Yes, I've seen empty plates as well. And also empty serving bowls, which unfortunately couldn't be interracted with or deleted except by also deleting the table they were on (or I suppose forcing an error might have done it).

I assume any food meories would become Maxis ones as well? Do sims even get memories for custom food?

No the memories become "learned to cook unknown". And yes sims get memories for custom food but not for all. I think it has something to do with the maxis food it is cloned from : some maxis foods trigger memories some don't.
What I found annoying is that simpe labels every custom foods memories with the name of the first custom food I have in my downloads directory, so it is a bit hard to tell which ones to erase...

Well, this all is probably not good. Memories of burning food get transferred through gossip, so if burning memories become "unknown" too, it could end up nasty.  :-\

That's why I took the time to erase them and I also use frequently the delete gossip memories from the lot debugger...

The food that was in my game just completely disappeared with no bad effects, though I kept the files in case, so thank you :)

I'lll delete the learnt to cook memories for those foods. I'm glad that was brought up, I would never have thought to check those! o_o;;

I had some problems with food with custom plates. I used to keep he food in the sims inventory before. Now after installing seasons. all meals with custom plates have completely gone from the inventory. Some food with Maxis plates I deleted left the empty plates there. Only custom food using the Maxis plates is still there.