it seems like it would be nice to have the total food at the top with the other resources.  Hopefully someone shows up and tells us what we are doing wrong...

Also, carivans between your own cities, do you get a benifit from this other than roads?  

So many questions, I am sure I will think of more lol

OK, so food is only used when you "Build" something?  Not every turn to support your population?

Basically you get food from fertile land, apiaries, oasis, wild wheat, and fruit groves (I think that's all of them).  As an example: Fertile land gives you +4 food which means you can build 4 buildings that require 1 food (houses, merchants, etc...).  Once those 4 are built it will no longer show you as having any food on the top of the screen.

-Food does not accumulate over time like gold or materials

-If it's showing you "have food" it means you can build a number of buildings that require food equal to how much food you "have."

-If it's showing you "have no food" it means you've built all the buildings you can for your food income.

-Having positive food is of no benefit, build more houses, merchants, etc... as soon as possible (unless saving for new cities or something)

-It IS possible to have negative food, not exactly sure what happens.  Seemed like my population starved in random cities but since the actual population doesn't matter once a city is already level 4 unless you want it to grow to level 5 I didn't care much.

As someone else said on here somewhere basically at the start of a turn it calculates how much food you have, say 9, and then calculates how much food your buildings use, say 8, and returns how much extra you have, in this case 1.  That 1 food does not carry over to the next turn, it just vanishes and on the next turn it recalculates your food again.

Hope this helps.

One of the reasons a food location may not be producing is it may not be linked (if it is in your area of influence, but so far away from cities, this can be the case). Click on it and read the note and it should say what city it is linked to.

More or less other posters have it on food. It is shown at the top of the screen IF you have a surplus. If you are about to go on campaign, you want some surplus because you may get a city or two that does not generate food from the enemy and you want to keep a positive balance. If you have a lot of excess food, you need to look at building more settlements and can also indulge in building merchants (they consume a food a turn as upkeep).

If you are running low on food and just can't find anymore and have not been using trade caravans, you need to get some going. The farther they go, the better and this will give you a good food boost.

no, you can accumulate food.

each city has a rate of consumption (based on your # of houses) but it's all drained from a communal pool.

city #1 has a food production of -4 because it's only got 1 farm and 8 houses.

(so all the food the farm is making is consumed, and then 4 more food is consumed from another city.)

city #2 has a food production of +6 due to 2 farms, irrigation, a npc farmer, and 4 houses.

(normally city #2 would have a food production of about 10, but those houses consume 4 of it so only 6 is added into the nations pool)

a better way to look at it is that this nation would have a total food production of 14 and a total food consumption of 12. now because there is surplus, this nation would accumulate 2 food every turn. building a house consumes 1 food as a construction cost, and then each turn after that it will continue to consume 1 food. and because of that the food surplus would only grow by 1 each turn after that. I'm pretty sure that building other than houses (that require it) only consume food as a construction cost, but don't add in to the consumption rate per turn.

as for having negative food production: I think that results in the town with the negative food consumption rate loosing population. (as in, city #1 would loose population if city #2 lost a farm for some reason.)

correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my observations on it.

Each turn food is set to 0 then all your farms produce XXX amout of food, with -XXX used by your cities...= current food amount. 

I have found food to be needlessly confusing as a new player and even having now played a number of games it still seems a bit off.

The easiest way it to just assume it spoils at the end of every turn, so if you get 4 food from you farm, and are using 3, you can't expect your food to ever be higher than 1 unless you, get more food tiles, get a caravan between a food city, hire a farmer and put him in that city, or destroy a food consuming building.  Oh, there is also a spell, and trading, but thats the only ways to increase food afaik.  Remember, if you have 3 cities, and city A has a farm, you can run a caravan from B->A, and C->A as well.

Its really alot simpler than all that. Some buildings provide an amount of food after you build them, some buildings need that food before you can build them. If a building provides 4 food you can build 4 other buildings that need 1 each. 

It's a simple abstraction based on the idea that a population of x needs y food per turn.

Food represents surplus food in the game so if it shows you have 1 food that means you have 1 extra food per turn that your population doesn't consume.

So you can only build improvements that let you expand your population like houses when you have surplus food to support them and they will then use up that food every turn so your surplus goes down when you build one.

Just remember it's the amount of surplus food you produce every turn that's shown and it does not accumulate.