Greg gave this awesome list of things he’s been planning for Mechaenetia here: Someone is already doing something similar of your ideas, check it out
Most of what you ask about is explained in some detail in those pages.
I do not recall reading about forcing other players to eat something, but even if that doesn’t exist i am sure it can be done easily enough… Even without the core concept of feeding someone something you can make a weapon that has the range of a tablespoon and shoots foodstuffs with magical buffs/debuffs.
Oh and unlike Minecraft, Meachaenetia will be open source and have modding in mind from the start. Pretty much like Factorio has done it, which ALWAYS leads to awesome mods from the get go.
Mind you, Greg explains modding in a very user friendly manner too. Not at all like Factorio’s artworks that require a bunch of external tools.
That is, aside from perhaps some Rust code explaining the interactions that happens, artwork is pretty much a block and color thing. You “draw” pixels in game. The most WYSIWYG game i’ve heard of.