Don't bother gathering your own meat. Buy it. Your energy has a value, that value is equal to what you can earn by making something. If what you earn by making something is greater than what you would spend buying an ingredient, you buy it.

Example:

Dish A requires 5 meat and some store bought items. To get 5 meat would cost you about 2 energy. With 1 more energy that means 3 energy to make the dish. Assuming you make 10 combines that's 30 energy and you'll get on average 25 dishes. Let's say you get 6k silver after tax per dish. That's 150k silver, or 5k silver per energy you spent.

Now, you harvested your own meat for those combines, spending 20 energy to get the 50 meat, or 0.4 energy per meat. You made 5k silver per energy, so that's an effective cost of 2k silver for that meat. Now let's say instead you buy the meat for 500 silver (easily doable currently).

So now you spend 500 silver x 50 meat, that's 25,000 silver. You now can make those same 25 dishes but only needing 10 energy as you didn't spend 20 energy on gathering meat. You still get 150k silver for selling, minus your 25k cost on the meat is 125k silver profit. So that's 12,500 silver per energy, over double what you made before. You only spent 10 energy, so you still have 20 left... repeat the above two more times... giving you 375k silver profit for the same 30 energy.

So...

Gathering your own meat... 30 energy = 150k silver profit.

Buying the meat... 30 energy = 375k silver profit.

Now you know the secret... now you just have to do all the calculations ;)