This page collection shows average gains of ingested foods, drinks and items used by a lot of friendly KoL players all around the world. Depending on how many times an item has been sampled, the data depicted here will be more or less reliable. For that reason, each entry in the charts is marked with how many samples the average is calculated from, so you get a good picture of the quality of the data. The charts may still fool you slightly though, for odd items such as the plethora of ! potions found in the Dungeons of Doom, each having different effects for different people, yet a consistent effect for each player.
This is the tool that records the effect of an item you use, and you use it like you use a normal browser bookmark. In other words: bookmark the link, and click it just before you use some item. After a (hopefully very) brief period of time, your inventory will be slightly edited, to show the fullness, drunkenness and gain estimates from these charts. A nice aspect of this, is that the effect of the ! potions mentioned above will only be based on what happened the times you yourself logged using them, and will thus always be representative.
If you wonder how this all works, it's both very simple and rather complicated. :-) Each time you use the bookmark, the "[eat]" (or which reading applies) links are changed to yet another bit of javascript that first performs the consuming, then logs the gains along with some other relevant info, such as the name of the player, whether it is a stat day and if Ode to booze is in effect. It is all automated, though, so you do not need to understand nor consider it when using the logger.
Actually, that is just almost true. If you get an Ode to booze cast on you, and log drinking some booze when your character pane does not yet show the Ode to booze icon, your log entry will be skewed in the database. I urge you to try to avoid that - I could fix the script to always reload the charpane, and thus get correct data at all times, but with the KoL servers already being as lagged as they are, I have opted not to. Hopefully the sheer volume of correctly logged rows will outweigh the few where this flaw shows up. If you do decide to drink a fine bottle of a rare wine, though, and have someone buff you up for the occasion, make sure you reload the page first. Thank you.
Okay, I thought this was going to be a boring spoiler if I wrote it, and kind of hoped it would be fairly easy to figure out anyway, but my keen lack of artistic coloring inspiration probably compensated for the intuitiveness of the idea itself. Red signals you either can't or should think twice about consuming something (because you are already too full, or because you would end up in a drunken stupor if you did). Green means it is especially good to consume something today because of stat day bonuses. The lighter the green, the more stats of the appropriate kind you gain. Yes, the green shades are butt ugly; they are calculated from the gain. I would like to change that to a fix set of beautiful greenish shades (five, perhaps, or three, if five is too hard to find) for different gain ranges, but that will not happen until someone suggests such shades. (Please do.) Yellow or orange shades is a mistake of mine, and signals both gain and warning at the same time.
A word of warning: don't rely too much on the red warnings; it is likely you won't always see them when you might think ought to. To be precise, there will not be any (correct) warning about fullness, unless you make sure you log everything you eat (since there is not any visible indicator anywhere to read how full you are and I infer fullness from what you have reportedly eaten today). Even if you do log everything, you may trick the fullness indicator by eating really close to (before or after) rollover. And as drunkenness goes, you are assumed to have a liver of steel. If you don't, you will never get red warnings about intoxication levels until you are already too drunk to adventure. (But you can always rely on red to mean either danger described above when you do see it.)
All users who have contributed data (and only in this automated form; I do not have the time nor will to add data by hand here -- except for fullness data which unfortunately can't be gathered automatically, this way) are credited for their contributions, by the way. At the time of writing this, I seem to be the most persistent (ab)user of this service, but I'm glad to see others ranking up beside me. Lots of other people besides you and me are also thankful for this service and value your data. This site would have been a lot worse without all the help and feedback I receive from happy fellow players.
The data in the tables sometimes looks a little weird, especially this can be the case when you're the first (be a hero!) to log something, and the effect you saw isn't exactly what you see in the table. Before you get too anxious, let me explain some more of what data these tables convey. It isn't a simple average of all logged effects; it's averages weighted to compensate for the effects of stat days and the Accordion Thief's song Ode to booze. The exact influences of these on what gains you receive consuming your goods is intentionally not mentioned here, but when the one and only sample of Maiali Sifilitici Pinot Noir you see here (at the time of writing) is reported to yield 55.3 moxie -- which isn't even an integer -- it is because the gain has been adjusted to better match a non-stat day's gain.
This page was much inspired by Solarflare's former similar project, so much in fact that I added a page with non-aggregated effects (it's BIG), showing each logged item consumption on a line of its own. The idea of suggesting optimal menus (solving the unbounded knapsack problem, example by Lawrence B. Holder) was suggested by BlingBling (Corwin Joy), along with that handy pointer. My version is based on Holder's implementation.
Thanks to all of you - these pages wouldn't be half as useful without all of your ideas, support and creativity.