Yeah, if you don’t find the food/travel/survival minI-game interesting (and goodness knows I sure don’t), the developers left easy ways out of it now. Take a Ranger (or green mage Wizard) with Goodberry or a Cleric with Create Food/Water. You trade off a prepared spell and a spell slot per day of travel in exchange for not caring about rations (though I still carry 1-2 per person “just in case”(tm)). I’d rather they added a “make food irrelevant” checkbox so I could get away with not even spending the spell slot, or if they just made food cheap and light enough that it didn’t matter, but barring that they at least provided a relatively low-cost way out of an un-fun mechanic. I doubt they’d remove the mechanic altogether as there are people who find it interesting for whatever reason, and as long as those people aren’t trying to force me to adhere to their preference I’m happy to return the favor.
My ranger doesn't have Goodberry, and even if she had, all slots have been used in battle.
Since there's nothing in the SRD about that and it's at the discretion of the GM, it should obviously be an option. I hardly see a GM saying "no, no, you must spend 4 days of travel to get new rations, then 4 days to get back. Game sessions wouldn't be that fun ;-)
And even if the GM made it mandatory, it probably means the game's over. Since the party couldn't hunt in that area, it means they won't have rations for their journey back, so they can't eat, can't rest. And let's assume they don't die of starvation, they wouldn't be able to face road encounters.
Just looking at the numbers, I see there are 50 available rations for the party to buy from Gorim. If I have to count 8 days of travel and let's say 3-4 days there, it's 12*4 = 48 rations. Perhaps I can manage to carry all 480 kg of them, somehow, if they're all paladins for example. But what do I do for the next trip?
EDIT: scratch that, it's 11 days and not 4...
I'm all for that checkbox :-) If they provided alternative solutions, that's because there's a problem to begin with, I just don't find it's a good solution (and it would force me to restart the game with a new ranger, whose spells will have to be sacrified just to eat). The right solution is to leave the rations in the inventory, and let the party hunt for food during the journey, it's quite simple and more realistic.
There's plenty of food at the bone keep just murder everything.
I haven't found any so far, and I can't continue further without getting spell slots back, there are some serious encounters awaiting.