Upping consumption would make starting forts needlessly difficult, probably even impossible for single pick challenge. It would be far better to decrease supply.
Some would argue that single pick challenge is needlessly difficult... I would think that folks who go for that sort of thing would welcome it being even harder. Same for embarking on a terrifying tundra with an aquifer below and tower next door.
There's been discussion about decreasing food supply, but it's problematic. If you look at butchery returns, farm plot yields, gathering, egg clutch sizes, milking frequency, etc. in isolation, they all seem reasonable enough. The problem comes when you look at how absurdly little a dorf eats in a year (~8 units of food).
As for making embarks needlessly difficult, I can think of two concerns: increased cost (in embark points) and increased labor (during the first year).
Re cost: Right now, 205 embark points (15% of total) gives a year supply of food for 9 dwarves and and a six-month supply of booze for 12 dwarves. That should be ample time to get some sort of food production up and running, as long as you can find soil or water to make an underground farm plot.
Plump helmets and strawberries cost 4 and 2 embark points, respectively. Booze, fish, and most meats are 2 points. Milk is 1 point. Right now, I normally embark with 60 milk (for cheese) and 15 meat; 10 plump helmets and 10 strawberries (= 100 booze after 4 brew jobs), 7 seeds each of pig tails, sweet pods and cave wheat; and 4 peafowl (1 male).
Re effort: Right now, my fort can get by for the first few years with just one dwarf working part time on food production (planting, butchering, tanning, brewing, cooking, cheese making). Putting another 60 embark points into a skilled grower and lye (for potash-making) significantly boosts farm yields. I completely ignore caravans, hunting, and plant gathering. Except to order barrels of lye from the dwarven liason (for fertilizer) so I don't have to make it myself.
Assuming the embark above, build nest boxes for the peafowl. Make a few cheeses to free up some barrels, brew the plump helmets, and plant the spawn. If nothing goes wrong, you'll have two crops of plump helmets by mid-summer, with cave wheat and pig tails arriving soon after. During slow moments, finish making the cheese, brew the strawberries, and cook up the food. Hatch the first batch of eggs, and collect eggs after that. Right about when the big spring wave of immigrants first gets hungry (late summer of the following year), you'll have a couple dozen full-grown peafowl ready to butcher, plus about 1000 booze from 8 crops of brewables (four types) that were harvested and brewed from the farm plots. That's about year supply of food and booze for 50 dwarves.
If dwarves ate and drank 10x more, then I estimate I'd need to spend about 40% of my embark points on food, and have 3 food production dwarves by the end of the first year instead of one. Still assuming no caravan or plant gathering.
I would probably double the milk and meat, and bring 4 extra peahens (186 pt). I'd bring 15 plump helmets and 5 strawberries for early booze (70 pt). I'd plant four farm plots instead of two, with the two new plots growing plump helmets, quarry bushes, and sweet pods for food (42 pts, focusing on farmer's workshop to process the latter two, milling can come later). I'd hatch three clutches of eggs for chicks twice a year and collect the rest of the eggs. Urist McFoodProducer would stay pretty busy, and I'd enlist a migrant or two to help him ASAP.
I usually have embark points to burn, so it would probably still be very doable (though more difficult) to embark in a reasonably calm location with the current point budget (decent military equipment gets expensive fast). I'd probably have to bring less sand, coal, ore, and wood that I currently use to jump-start things and be lazy. In any case, Toady would almost certainly adjust the default embark points to compensate, like he did after stepladders were added. The dwarfpower required early on wouldn't be outrageous, either, especially if I supplemented with plant gathering and caravans (which are fairly low labor food sources). If opportunity presented, I'd do some military hunting with the marksdwarf I always bring for early defense.