This is one of those "just lvl it while you're young and trust me on the benefits" skills.  I utterly ignored both this and fishing until about lvl 45.  Then I began seeing the buff food and started to see how as one poster put it that gathering your food was so much cheaper over time.  When you get to the point where you have thousands of hit points and mana points you can either eat for for a few seconds, or you can sit for about 10 minutes while it comes back naturally (and all the once dead mobs repop around you).