What is the point of cooking food?

There is one worthwhile cooking/food item: Elsweyr Fondue provides a massive Magicka boost with an absurdly long duration.

Other cooking items are primarily just low level health and stamina consumables and can easily be ignored unless you're serious about role playing. Other than that, it's just another crafting mechanic that DLC and modders can easily hook into, so we might see more useful stuff in the future.

Quoting Cooking is Overpowered on YouTube:

Cooking in Skyrim is not at all the worthless skill it is made out to be. The benefits of stamina regeneration are huge, while the value of fondue to a caster is more than you might realize.

Summary:

Apparently power attacks only require one point to be activated, which makes the long lasting Stamina Soups more useful than they appear to be. While under the effect of the soup, you can chain power attacks for twelve minutes.

Eslweyr Fondue increases your Magicka by 100 points, also for a duration of 720 seconds (12 minutes). This "saves you 10 levels worth of points that you do not have to invest in Magicka".

Well, that is if you can be bothered making the food in the first place. Personally I couldn't be bothered hunting for Eldar Cheese Wheels when I am already overwhelmed with Smithing, Enchanting and Alchemy. But when those skills are maxed this could be fun to play with :)

There is no cooking skill, however there are a few benefits of cooking over Alchemy:

• ingredients are more plentiful, and there are less options
• the ingredients by themselves will heal you (for a much smaller amount) even without cooking
• several foods (my favorite being Apple Cabbage Stew) restores both health and stamina still with the same simple ingredients
• the effects of food and ingredients don't have to be discovered, they are always known
• cooking can't fail and cause you to lose ingredients