I have food with blank names and several that show up as "Cereal," "Pork Chops," and "Salmon." They show up normally when cooked. I can't figure out which ones are doing this and just spend half a day trying to, so at this point, I don't care if they don't show up properly. I just want to know if they're safe to use.

I've never used custom food so I can't be certain but it's probably just that the creator forgot to do something with the text or did something wrong there. I would think so long as the food is still being cooked and eaten properly that it would be fine to use.

Somebody else probably knows more than me.

What language are you playing in? If your game is set up to a different language than the one the creator uses (generally English) and they didn't translate or empty the text strings, it'll look like that. The food is completely safe to use and you could get away with remembering "First Pancakes in the menu is the normal, second the download".

If you want to fix this, open the file in SimPE (make a backup first) and select "Text Lists" on the left side. There should be several text lists in the middle, you'll need to click through those until you find the right one. It should look like this:



No all you need to do is select your language and either copy the English text strings there or translate them if you want to go the extra mile. Commit and save. I've done this for all my downloaded food, it's easy and doesn't even take that long.

The first part of the text string is the submenu from your fridge (Like "Make Breakfast" - "Pancakes"), by the way, so you can choose if you want a special submenu for downloaded food or want it to show up in the same category as your normal food. You might have already noticed that some of the downloaded food that shows up with its proper name has its own English submenu, that's where this comes from.

I have already done this as well as changed everything to default language only. I still have duplicates. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong because some of them show up correctly in memories, but not in the fridge menu. I'm playing in US English.

Edit: It's fixed! I had to select default language in the text files in addition to the catalogue description! And it only took four sessions of editing 418 individual files!