Spoiled Horse Meat

Your duo partner keeps a personal box behind his own code lock, and he has not logged in since Tuesday. Before that he shot a wild horse by the road and put the raw horse meat in that very box. When he finally turns up on Saturday, he opens it to a stack of spoiled horse meat.

The game text keeps it simple: consuming it will damage your health. No recipe uses it, so the stack is worth nothing except as feed for the farm's composter.

Shared food fixes this. Big hauls go into one fridge that everyone can open, and whoever is online turns a batch into cooked horse meat for the team.