Thanks for trying the game. I had planned on adding speech but when I went to make a build, the size was too big. Ended up trading the dialogue time with trying to optimize/delete everything I could to make the file size smaller.
Not sure why the tavern keeper didn't have the meat. It should have been a dislogue option if you visited blacksmith first. (I stuck with the cliche of backtracking for that kind of thing.) Sorry it didn't work.