The food system does work and is fairly balanced, except (in my opinion) for one thing. And that is the amount of damage you can actually tank by just eating mangos and pineapples. My idea of a rework is followng:
It should take a certain period of time to heal after the, for example, pineapple is eaten. This period of time would scale with the amount of health the food item gives back in total, which means that bananas (gives 20% hp) would give almost instant health back, while pineapples (gives 2*100% hp) would take a longer period of time/give less hp/sec. Other food items such as pork and coconuts could scale accordingly, which would change the PvP side of the game so pineapples and mangos would not always be the go to in combat situations.
