Chalk up another who wants farming to be something you either focus your fort on because you're doing an agro-fort, or something that you have to outsource to your hilldwarves in late game. But that needs hilldwarf, farming and trading improvements, so. Plus general improvements to food storage and dining so dwarves are eating actual hot meals, eating, drinking and socialising at dinner time and so forth, and have to worry about keeping their crops (a big incentive to swap to things like Dwarven Wheat, since flour keeps a lot longer than vegetables - seasonal crops are another great one).
Ideally food would come in preserved and fresh forms; preserving food would be easier or harder depending on what you were preserving - you might need to be constantly producing vinegar to make pickled Plump Helmet, but to make dwarven flour all you need is a millstone and a bag. Dwarves should get a syndrome (scurvy) if they're only eating preserved food, but it should be hard to produce and store enough fresh food to feed a large population. So you need to have both a large grain store and a reasonable number of kitchen gardens etc.
Another one I'm in favour of is needing to either be constantly fertilising your underground fields or planting the cavern layers. Something that makes it easiest to do the sort of boom-and-bust farming cycle that would incentivise food preservation without arbitrarily insisting on growing seasons for underground crops.
But yeah. Upping what dwarves eat seems like a good stopgap. Maybe having idle dwarves eat at a lower hunger threshold, because they have time to snack, while they have to get hungrier to stop work.