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The first night Wild was with them and they actually had a chance to try to cook. They dismissed him eating their almost sentient dinner as politeness. But then, some of them began to notice...oddities, about Wild and his eating habits.
While the Hero of the Wilds could cook, and quite well (thank Hylia), he didn’t seem to have any discriminatory tastes. He ate his own food, inn food, rations, raw ingredients, and as previously mentioned, Hyrule’s cooking. They were tempted to say he didn’t have taste buds at all until he helped Time recreate a dish that he said he hadn’t been able to find anywhere except from his wife.
They had been leaning over the cooking pot, Time frowning, trying not the let the hope show too much on his face. He had been feeling awfully homesick, his Hyrule being one of the least visited so far, and he missed his wife and her cooking. Wild was an amazing cook, don’t get him wrong, but there was just something specific about Malon’s cooking. Maybe because eating her food meant he was home and could relax.
He tried to contain his disappointment when the recipe was still off. It was delicious but it wasn’t right. Wild hummed at his elbow, contemplating his own mouthful, the dish they were trying to recreate one he had only had once a while back when they had been lucky enough for a break in Time’s era.
Wild tilted his head back and forth in thought, gaze unfocused in the distance to better focus on the flavor. His eyes brightened as he came to a conclusion, pulling out another plant and shaving pieces of it into the soup. Giving it a stir he watched it simmer a little longer before gesturing to Time to try it again. He dipped his spoon in carefully, blowing briefly.
Time didn’t know what magical plant that was but it had added its own flavor while enhancing several others. “This is it!” Wild smiled around his own spoon as the other boys perked up, heads swiveling towards the pair and the pot they stood over.
The fact that Wild could figure out what was missing was proof enough that not only did he have taste buds but that they were working very well.
From there Wild ate the somehow both burnt and raw meal that Hateno’s children excitedly gave him. The raw fish delicacy from Lurelin (which truly more of a taste preference as even Wind liked those particular dishes but not many of the rest of them could handle the idea). The raw meat from, well his slate, but he had petulantly grumbled that he had been hungry and didn’t feel making them all stop so he could cook a snack. From somewhere in the exclamations of disbelief Wild was reminded of his flameblade. Which, he immediately took out, held it parallel to the ground, and laid the partially eaten steak on top of it. The little gremlin even had the audacity to hum as if he were at a cooking pot and not cooking on his weapon.
(That night Twilight had a dream that at this point he was sure some sort of future memory where he had wrestled Wild in his wolf form to get the kid to not eat directly from a deer carcass like he’d seen actual wolves do.)
Up until then he had at least been eating food (loosely applied to Hyrule’s attempts at cooking). Sky shrugged when Wild had dropped the apple he had been snacking on and then continued to eat. He did a double-take though when he realized that Wild didn’t even bother trying to get rid of the dirt that clung to the inside flesh of the apple and just ate the apple, dirt and all.
Hyrule was much less bothered when Wild popped a freshly picked mushroom into his mouth without bothering to rinse it off. Pretty sure there was a bug on it but sometimes it just be like that.
Warriors was picking various wildlife debris off of Wild when he came back with Hyrule. Wild reached for the pieces he could see and instead of, oh throwing it on the ground like a normal person, Wild ate it. When questioned the wild child shrugged and said that’s how he discovered mighty thistles.
By now the rest of the group of Wild’s ability to eat basically anything. Wild himself didn’t find this strange and admitted that he has eaten literal rocks and that Goron cuisine is not given enough credit (Twilight had thrown his hands up and stalked into the tree line shaking his head).
At some point, Four, Wind, and Sky started trying to figure out things that their resident goat couldn’t or wouldn’t eat. (‘Well depends, I’d rather not eat my own attempts at rock hard food but if I were in a pinch I would,’ Wild told them when asked, looking a little absently at the Master Sword on Sky’s back.)
His...er, ability? Came in handy every once in a while. Some grateful Hylian wanted to express their gratitude for saving them so they were making some fancy seafood dish. They offered Wild the first taste and after their cook had swallowed the Hylian’s partner came home and almost fainted when they realized that their partner just poisoned the hero's close friend.
The creature they had used apparently had a poison sack that, if not removed fully and carefully (without popping it) was very very toxic. Wild appeared unconcerned and perhaps a little confused at everyone’s panic after that. (‘What? I’ve eaten this before.’) Of course he had. Otherwise, he would’ve told their grateful host while they had been making it because he had been in the kitchen the entire time.
(They had asked about the meals that he had been making them, a little worried that he would accidentally poison them just because he didn’t know that a plant was dangerous. He told them that he first started by using plants everyone seemed amiable to and then whenever he tried something new make sure to avoid anything that anyone showed an aversion to. Whether when gathering with him, when it was mentioned, or if they saw it in his inventory. He hadn’t known that some of that aversion wasn’t just personal preference and that some of it was because they were poisonous.)
That’s when they realized that Wild was basically immune to most if not all types of ingestible poison. (There appeared to be some resistance to injected poison as the spread was significantly slowed.)
“Wait, what if it’s just a part of Hylian biology in the first place in his time? He’s the newest of us all isn’t he?” Sky asked (the aforementioned accidental almost poisoning had been in Wind’s Hyrule).
The next time they were in Wild’s Hyrule they had asked Flora about it and...nope. She had expressed exasperated amusement when she told them about the first time he ate rocks when visiting Daruk, surrounded by his fellow soldiers. When asked if she had any theories she shrugged, “We think it may have to do with the Shrine of Resurrection. Honestly, Purah and I are still looking into it, since it doesn't explain how he could eat rocks before it.”
They left with no answers. They were able to teach Wild which things were poisonous to people who were not him so that was a plus. But when it came to himself, Wild had no regard for what was or was not “food”. Anything goes.
(After Wild had learned that other people were far more picky about what they consumed he was careful to never let them know what he makes his elixirs out of)