The first thing to watch is food condition since anything below 20% gets pretty risky, and even higher-condition cooked meat can sometimes make you sick. When handling raw meat or fish you'll want to cook it which helps reduce the risk but doesn't completely eliminate it until you hit cooking level 5, that's when you get full immunity to cooked food poisoning.

Always keep antibiotics or reishi tea in your inventory since you'll need either 2 antibiotics or 1 cup of tea followed by exactly 10 hours of sleep to cure poisoning. The timing here is crucial, if you don't sleep right after taking meds the treatment won't work properly. Pay attention to your eating patterns, because consuming multiple questionable items quickly can stack the poisoning effect and reset the recovery timer which runs 12 to 24 hours.

Smart positioning near shelter when testing suspicious food lets you recover quickly if things go wrong. Your condition drops 1% every 2 minutes while poisoned and will keep dropping until you hit 15%, so timing that treatment window matters. Especially on higher difficulties, don't even think about touching raw meat or predator meat without having treatment ready, since parasites need way more antibiotics to cure. While regular herbal tea helps with hydration, only antibiotics or reishi tea will actually cure the poisoning effect, and you'll want to save those safe packaged foods for when you're really desperate and can't risk getting sick.