When my old man peep grills his heart out happily, no one eats the food. It just disappears and he walks sadly across the deck into the house to brush his hair. No one gets to eat the grilled food and no one's fed bar shows an increase. I downloaded again yesterday and still have the problem.

That's normal. The barbecue is a fun activity, not a source of food.

That's a good thing to know! Wont be spending unnessary $$$, YET.

You would think that maybe they could put the food on a plate and bring it in the house to eat Some things don't "do" anything. I would wish that all objects affected the game somehow.

It appears that the trophy for certain objects, including the grill, is simply for owning them, not for using them.

I had thought maybe the chance of conceiving a baby would be increased once I bought the new sheets/pillows to make the bedroom more romantic, but it didn't seem to help.

Perhaps not EVERY item/object, that would be next to impossible. But for sure the barbecue, even if the food increase were ever so slightly.

My observation regarding the energy-bar:
It doesn't seam to make any difference how exhausted the grown-ups are, they happily go on doing their work. At least that's the case with my VF.

Haven't been able to connect, the server seam to be down quite frequently!

I don't think that making every object/item do somthing or affect the game is impossible. It's simply a programming issue. My thought is that they want to save some things for additional releases which is ok but I still want it the other way! LOL