DANGER, BOSS! I mean, LONG POST!
Just for fun, I tried the "holding out on quests" idea on the Spanish server. Only had a few games so far, but with interesting results. Looking at the Items/Quests table -- thank you, 30191! -- it turned out that you can do well just by avoiding food (i.e. the Delicacies quest). You can still unlock a lot of great potential items with other quests.
So, I completed these quests:
* Technological Advance (making the two books potentially available)
* Difaïned Treasure
* Find the secret golden coins!
* The First Key!
* Learning how to launch shurikens
No books
yet, but I'm pretty happy with the items I've found in the meantime: lots of gold coins, several big unemployments, tons of ninjutsu artefacts, and plenty of administrative material (including two pencil containers on the first game after I'd unlocked them). Also found the Old Rusty Key on the very next game after I found the Wooden Master Key! Amusingly, I just played one game where I collected five

on the way to level 63, the first three of which I obtained by level 7.

I've actually done better in terms of points, overall, than I have with my English character here. (I nearly reached 2 million points by the early 60s there, whereas it's taken me until at least the 80s to gain that many here with the same skill level.)
Unfortunately, clumsy Igor just stumbled into the last of the Delicacies items by accident.

So I guess I can't keep up this experiment now.
But it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that, although you'll lag behind on all your food quests, there might be something to be gained by completing others first -- if you can avoid those danged lollipops.

(I suppose that if I was only after the books, I could have avoided absolutely everything except for Technological Advance -- but the way I did try it was a lot more fun!)