Also I'm pretty sure that problem with the food loot is due to the fact that the food models aren't showing up, I've noticed when you come across plain food like apples, tomatos, peppers etc, their model doesn't show up in the game world, it doesn't even really show in the inventory sometimes, which is prob why a lot of people are starving because they can't see the food and don't want to have to keep their inventory huds open in order for the background icons to show up for the food.
For example, look at this pic again:
You see the dark grey rectangular icon beneath the cooking pot as well as the dark grey cube beneath the 40x bullets right next to the blank 100%?
Those are what the food loot looks like now most of the time, the food is still there, just extremely hard to find because it's all practically invisible.