Hey thanks for playing and for the detailed feedback !
Those conflictual goals are a byproduct of the chaotic start of the game's developement. Until very late I wasn't sure if the goal was to keep the city alive or to kill it as quickly as possible to stack the most profit. This is also why the final screen show both your total fortune as well as the number of year survived : so you can choose your favorite goal and stick to it.
"Ingredients" are a way to increase the "hygiene" of a district. That hygiene is displayed when you click on them. The lower the hygiene get and the more likely the district is to suffer a plague outbreak. The same goes for "faith" and for undead attacks. They are not stored but immdiatly spent on a specific district.
The event that add corpes add them through the same system. Which mean that X indigents simply get added to a random district as if they had just died here.
I've tried it both way, trying to min max graveyards placement to increase the speed at which the city dies and trying to keep the best district from crumbling too rapidly and I've enjoyed them both. The city dying quickly is by design : I wanted the game to feel arcady and to be played in quick session.
Anyway, thanks again. It means a lot to get such a deep response to a quite simple game.