Nutrient paste dispenser

The nutrient paste dispenser is an electrical device that converts raw food placed in an adjacent hopper into nutrient paste meals; the machine accepts all food except hay. The meals are produced on demand, when a colonist or prisoner uses the machine. No work bills or tasks can be performed at the machine, and no skills are necessary to use it. Animals can not use the machine, but will eat the produced meals if they are fed to them by other means.

Usage

The paste dispenser will be used automatically if it is available, accessible and powered up. Pawns will always prefer a more tasty food, and only use the dispenser if no better option is available.

It is possible to trick a pawn into producing an arbitrary amount of meals (see below).

At least one hopper needs to be attached to the dispenser, and the hopper needs to be filled with sufficient raw food to produce at least one meal. All food except hay is usable by the machine. Hoppers act like storage zones, and are configured in the same way. Colonists will deliver food to the hopper as a hauling task, just like supplying storage zones with items.

Note: Unbutchered bodies will be consumed by the machine, and only a single meal will be produced. The body will disappear without trace. If you build hoppers, eg. inside a freezer room, on top of an existing corpse, the corpse will be fed through the hopper into the paste dispenser. Make sure to clear any space for a new hopper if you do not want this to happen.

The dispenser will process insect meat and human meat at the full nutritional value, but eating the produced meals will incur the same mood effects as if the ingredients were cooked (eg. Cooked cannibalism for a nutrient paste meal made from human meat).

The paste dispenser acts like a wall that will separate rooms. Usually one will put the rear end (where the hoppers are attached) inside a refrigerated zone, so the raw ingredients will not spoil. The length of the device even allows for refrigerated and non-refrigerated hoppers on the same machine.

If the front end of the machine is inside a prison cell, only prisoners will be allowed to use it (just like with food that is stored in the prison cell).

When you build a NPD, the game will notify a hopper is needed
Hopper storage menu to select ingredients
Hopper mouse indicator will turn from red to green for correct placement and colonists will pick NP meals from the dispenser

Strategy

The nutrient paste dispenser is helpful, but not necessary for survival, unless the colony is in an extremely unforgiving environment, such as an ice sheet.

It is by far the most efficient way to prepare raw food in the game, increasing the nutritional value of its raw inputs by 200%. The nutrient paste dispenser never causes food poisoning, and will always instantly produce food on demand, as long as raw ingredients are available.

Building a paste dispenser early on will speed up colony development substantially. This is because it not only makes a cook unnecessary, it also uses the raw food far more efficiently than cooking does. Therefore, far fewer work hours will be required to produce the raw food (from hunting animals or growing plants). Also, early colonies often struggle with food poisoning, especially if no competent cook is available. This, too, is completely avoided if a dispenser is used exclusively.

However, consuming a nutrient paste meal gives your colonist an “Ate awful meal” bad thought, reducing mood by -4 (this is still better than the -7 mood "Ate raw food" thought). Compared to preparing fine meals for your colonists at all times, you will incur a net -9 mood penalty if you only serve nutrient paste; this is a substantial drawback of the dispenser. Especially at higher difficulties it might not be practical to use only nutrient paste for an entire campaign.

Be aware that converting human or insect meat to a nutrient paste meal does not mask its origins. Doing so results in all appropriate bad thoughts hitting at once.

Manually producing meals

Using the paste dispenser is an automatic task that can not be explicitely triggered. It is still possible to make a pawn produce as many meals as you want, until the machine runs out of raw food to process.

You need at least one pawn to be hungry enough to demand a meal. This will happen at least once per day, per pawn.

You will also have to forbid all other foods, so the pawn will be forced to use the nutrient paste dispenser. If you do not want to forbid a lot of possible food stacks on the map (or change the food policy), you can instead create a temporary zone restriction that will force the pawn next to the paste dispenser, and away from any other food sources.

Forcing the pawn to create meals exploits the fact that a pawn stops their current action when they are drafted:

When the pawn walks to the dispenser, she will produce a single meal and begin to eat it. At this point, pause the game and draft the pawn. This will make the pawn stop eating and drop the meal right next to them. Forbid the meal that was just dropped, resulting in a forbidden stack of 1 nutrient paste meal. Now, repeatedly draft and undraft the pawn, which will make them produce an additional meal each time you undraft them, and they will drop it on the existing (forbidden) stack when re-drafted. You can simply hold down the draft hotkey in order to rapidly fill up a stack of meals.

If you produce more than one full stack of 10 meals this way, you will have to forbid any new stacks that are created, or else the process will get stuck in a loop. New meal stacks will be created even if the pawn is completely surrounded by stacks. The new stacks will simply appear at the next available location.

You can repeat this until the food hoppers are depleted. The entire process will require no in-game time, since the game is paused all the way.

Now you can have as many nutrient paste meals as your heart desires! Enough to take with you on cold journeys! Enough to make an emergency food stockpile! Enough to use as animal fodder!

The pawn has just grabbed a meal from the dispenser, and wants to eat it. The game is paused at this point. If you draft the pawn now, he will drop the meal on the floor.
This is how it looks like after a couple of stacks have been produced, simply by drafting and undrafting the pawn. The game remains paused all the way. When a new stack appears, it has to be forbidden for the process to continue.
Beyond 3 tiles, you do not even need to forbid stacks any more.