I have a lot of custom food and there are some things I'd like to change, but can't figure out how. My game is in German, which is probably causing half the problems. I'm guessing all those problems can be fixed with SimPE, but couldn't find any tutorials for it.

1) Some custom food shows up under the wrong name in the fridge menu. For example, I have chicken wings that show up as "Hummer" (the lobster they were probably cloned from). So obviously I have to guess which lobster is the correct one when I cook.

2) This is more of a minor annoyance, but there are too many categories on my fridge. I have the German "Mittagessen servieren" and the English "Serve Lunch", because some of the downloaded food shows up in one menu and some in the other. Then there's the creators that just made their own category, and some double stuff from Maxis themselves.

3) Finally, some food simply doesn't show up at all. I've been able to find most of it in the "Prepare Meal" section, but not in the breakfast/lunch/dinner options. This is the only part I've actually found a tutorial for - there's one that teaches you how to make food not show up in those options, so I figured I'd just do this backwards. Problems is, as far as I can tell, the flags are already set correctly. The food is flagged as, for example, breakfast, but it doesn't show up in (either of) the breakfast menu(s).

It has been ages, but I remember that when I had the game in Italian, I use to translate the foods in SimPE and, if I'm not wrong, just translating the menu would put them in the right place. Anyway, it has been such a long time that I'm not sure lol
Actually is quite easy to translate in SimPe, and I think you'd be able to solve the 3 problems you listed since it sound to me like all your custom foods lack of German translation (of course, back up the file before editing it!):

-Open the package;
-In the Resource List, search for the voice "Text List";
-Then in the "Plugin View" select the language you want to edit (by default it should be English) and if the objects doesn't come with any language but English, you'd see "empty" written in brakets.
-Be sure to respect the same grammar/puntuaction/capital letters of the voice in your game: sometimes the menù are doubled because of that.
i.e. writing "Have for Lunch..." instead of "Have Luch..."

I've made a screenshot so you can see by yourself:
http://imgur.com/a/QxCao

About the wrong name, are you sure they're not bad made? Are you still able to get the lobster? I mean, they might override the original one and that's way they looked messed up. For your last problem, probably the food is designed to be served in a different moment of the day.

I think that's all sorry if I'm not very clear in my explanations, but when it comes with technical stuff I'm always a mess

The food's name is also determined by the text lists; you'll probably find that the creator updated the name in the English text list, but not in the German one. If you update the German text list (or the English US one if the German one is empty), that will fix that problem.

Thanks, that was really helpful! And easy to understand too.

As for being made badly, the lobster is still an option, I just have two things called "lobster" in the pie menu. For example, I just opened up the package for a cake and the English text list says things like "Serve Dessert...\Banana & Cherry Sponge Cake", but in German it's called Sahnekuchen, which is the Maxis cake it was cloned from. So if I change the text list, instead of three Sahnekuchen, I'll have the Maxis cake and the two downloaded cakes.

edit: Oh good grief... I think I've figured out why some food never shows up. It's untranslated text lists again, but this time the food was cloned from another custom food. So I was like "Wait, I have chocolate milk? I didn't know I had chocolate milk!" and the German text list was the same as for the 7up custom drink. 7up shows up, chocolate milk doesn't. I've changed the text list, maybe now it will.

This is why you should always hit the "Default lang only" button if you're a creator!

The chocolate milk now appears, as do some other mssing foods, and the rest has their correct names. Thanks for the help!