Could someone explain to me how this decay system works.

ATM what I am finding is that any food items(fish/plants) I had before decay was activated has a "shelf life" of 5-7 game days, most of which has reached the broken stage and been deleted by the game, and that is despite some of them being in the special baskets/pouches.

Now anything I catch/forage is giving me a 20-25 game days of a "shelf life", and it doesn't matter where I store it as that doesn't change.

It appears to be the same with cooked food, 100 games days on every kebab I've cooked, and yet again it doesn't appear to matter where I store them.

Oh and cooked food relies only on the QL of the raw items, rather than both the QL and decay state, as you get the same stats from a broken moderate QL rainbow trout as you do from a pristine one.