Here's what's happening, for those who haven't seen this complaint from me before:

SOMETIMES, when my Sims eat, the hunger bar continues in a negative direction while they're chomping. They don't appear to be performing any actions other than chewing.... and belching. They won't talk to each other, they'll just sit staring straight ahead, masticating like machines, forever, unless I direct them to stop eating and clean up. This happens both at both autonomous meals and ones that I initiate, but less frequently on autonomous... I THINK.

SOMETIMES, on the other hand, they're able to make food and eat it normally. This appears to be more likely to happen with the more basic food items, although I couldn't swear to this.

With foods like cookies, chips, popcorn and other things they might eat straight out of the fridge or a vending machine, it's no problem... albeit not especially satisfying. Likewise with grilled hot dogs, and the pizza-maker, which is a genius invention - a family of four can have a filling dinner in less than the time it takes to microwave a cup of ramen.

As this is not a 100%-of-the-time issue, and as it really produces no error messages... what to do? A 50/50 sweep might turn up more useful info, but like I said, sometimes this isn't an issue, and so it might not - how would I tell whether it was my act of moving mods in and out of the downloads folder, or just the specific circumstances of the eating? Thanks to the SimBlender, I can instantly max out everyone's hunger without causing any problems, so they're not actually going to die from malnourishment. But honestly, I'm a little lost. Last time it happened, I was running the testing cheats, and tried "force error" on someone's bowl of cereal, which didn't appear to do anything. Is there any way to figure this out if there's no error reported?

When I was having my phone issues, some Simmers who had experienced the same symptoms in their game reported in. Some of those were red herrings, and some were actually helpful, but ALL of them were appreciated.

I forgot - the other half was that food seems to go bad very quickly. If anyone knows a smart way to alleviate this problem, I'm open to suggestions. Thanks All.