Lavish meal

A lavish meal is created at an electric stove or fueled stove and requires 0.5 nutrition from any combination of animal products and meat (10 meat, 10 milk or 2 eggs) and 0.5 nutrition from vegetables (10 non-Hay vegetarian products) to create. A colonist with cooking skill of at least 8 is required to create this meal. When eaten it causes the Ate lavish meal thought with a +12 mood bonus. A lavish meal provides 1.0 nutrition.

Analysis

Producing a lavish meal takes 1.0 nutrition in ingredients and produces 1.0 nutrition in results. Lavish meals consume twice as many ingredients and require 75% more work than fine meals to produce one meal, so you should wait to switch to lavish meals until the mid-late game when food is no longer an issue most of the time, and your Cook(s) are more proficient in their duties.

Unless/until you can support the food and increased labor cost to support a policy of producing enough for all, these should be reserved for special needs, when specific colonists need a mood boost, to avoid a break or to encourage mental inspiration. Since the mood boost lasts an entire day, a few of these, set aside for such times and then manually prioritized to eat once/day (along with simple or fine meals), should suffice.