The Tavern

I believe the purpose of devs creating limited inventory spaces was to encourage making start, tactical decisions. Should I drop this swap ring and carry one more wand? Should I bring this resist stick weapon with me? etc...
But if you look at any experienced person's game, the slots do not make a huge difference and food is just a thing that takes up needless slots. The best choice you can make is just much a lot of jerkies in zot or drop it somewhere for a *small* slimmer of chance that you go low on food while doing extended. It is a no-brainer choice and is not a fun factor.
Removing food slots will simplify the process, instead of just typing 'Y' to "Ignore this jerky Y/N". It would make inventory managing easier and will not have huge impact, since most people just carry a single stack of bread rations.

Sounds like a sensible suggestion. The next step, of course, is to automate the eating of food. Perhaps, food could also be automatically given to the player as well, since the dungeon tends to generate a pretty consistent amount of it. Then, if the mechanic really isn't affecting many games, it could be removed as redundant.

I'm only being somewhat facetious here. Seriously, I think it's well worth pointing out that virtually every suggestion to make food easier to deal with sounds like the first step towards removing it.

Daily reminder that food removal patch exists in the form of hellcrawl and has gotten unanimously positive reviews.

just to be clear, it's the removal of food in hellcrawl that's gotten unanimously positive reviews, the patch itself was pretty janky the last time I checked

You can do a more polished one in .20. I believe in you.