I have investigated this a bit further, and I think I have found the problem.
When you add an item to a recipe, say pineapple to a fruit salad, it doesn't use the whole pineapple, but only a certain amount of it(I think its using the hunger stat for this)
So a fresh pineapple reduces hunger by 25. If I add it to a fruit salad, it takes away 10, so the pineapple only have 15 hunger reduction left. This is fine, and you can add the pineapple again, so you have taken away 20 hunger reduction from it, and is now left with 5. Here is the problem, to add the pineapple to the fruit salad, you need a value of 10, but you only have 5 left, so the pineapple is no longer suitable for the recipe, and the game throws an error when you try to use it.
I have had problems with adding meats to burgers/roasting pan too, but when I tested this with spawning in meat patty's and mutton chops, both had 40(4x10) hunger value each, so I couldn't reproduce it. I do think the hunger value of an item changes a bit over time as part of the decay process, which I suspect could be why I had problems in my actual game, but not in the test save.
Until its fixed, I found its easier to add food to a recipe by right clicking the burger/roasting pan etc in your inventory as opposed using the crafting menu to make food, as there you will see how much food value is left in the item you try to add, so you can add the ones that still have enough food in them still avoiding the errors(and might actually get some food!).