Items in Space Station 3D is probably no different than any other game you've played. The term refers to basically anything the player can pick up by conventional means.

For technical documentation see link below.

Things to place objects into.

A storage locker, an ore box, a cooking pot, a cigarette box, a chest cavity: if it can hold an object or a substance, it is a container.

Players should be able to open, access the containers and interact with the contents: take stuff out and put stuff in.

Depending on the container, the items within can also be used by some system even without player's direct control. For example, a magazine has it's bullets removed with every shot from the weapon this magazine is installed in. The contents of a gas cannister should be released in the atmosphere, should it ever be opened into it. Etc.

Hold Positions are the position on an item that a character holds it by. They are empty objects used to simply set a location and rotation. Link below is a video showing them in use on items in-game.

https://ss3d.space/assets/img/posts/20.05.01/ItemOrientations.mp4

Some items may have more than one Hold Position. Different variables like object's shape, object's type, object's state, character's intent, character's species, character's hand, character's pose etc.. may effect how a item is held. This will be managed via different Hold Positions.

Examples:

Food is designed to be eaten. That means that the food's Primary interaction is allways to consume it yourself. Bite-by-bite or, if not aplicable, until the dish eventually ends.

Player should also be able to stop eating at any time. It the food is bite-sized and every interaction is one bite after another, then there's not even an issue. If the food is eaten continuously (drinking a bowl of soup, eating spaghetti or salad) then at any point the player should be able to stop the eating process.

Most of our food is bite-able, as in it can be eaten with several sequentia bites: cake, pie, pizza, toast, steak, kebab. So it should be bitten by the character (if the food is small enough - manually, if it's big enough - automatically) and the model of the food should change to different stages of being eaten.

Then some of our food is packaged, and character just puts a hand into the package, retrieves a piece and eats it. It should require only package in different stages of being emptied and at least one piece of the food within.

And then there's food that needs utensils, like salad, spaghetti, soup, icecream bowl. Those are usually served in a dish of some sort, with the contents being on top of it, visible to the player. To simulate eating it, the contents of the dish should flatten or shrink with consuming of the said food.

Applying fork to food should result in character using said fork to consume the food. Same with other utensils and other types of food. We would need to make some generic food chunk and alter the size and color of it depending on the food it came from, to put it in a fork/spoon/shopsticks when those are used to consume the food.

We can disregard the types of food and their accordance to the silverware usually used for those foods, or even use that as a comedic releaf of sorts. For example, eating a soup with a fork would take x5 the time to finish the meal.

We can certainly allow players to eat without utensils, "animal-style", but have a chance of spilling the food (adds splatter decals onto character's clothes). And it's generally good for RP anyway, so having both options seems like the best choice.