no clue, but if it's tied to population, and we are able to get a excess of food, population will take off until it reaches maximum sustainable, if we can't get a excess, then we spend the whole game having our whole population getting ONLY food, instead of building or researching or making armies.
I think that we shouldn't have to spend more then half our population getting and maintaining food , i mean sure, someone could get a food excess, but if it isn't tied to population then it would be fine.
Mabey have pop growth be percenage based of a absolute(eg. everyone gets a constant 10% pop growth as long as they are fed and morale is above 3), or mabey have it morale based like it used to be (would be big for those with morale bonuses but whatever).
but the way it is, it will take me having 15 food at the end of the turn (9 for growth and 6 for food consumption with three population, 3 getting 2 per land, and the 3 bonus food i get), and that would take me 5 turns of doing nothing else at all (starting from 0 food), and if i spend 1 turn building something with 2 labor, then i would take a additional 2 turns.
While on the other hand, if we got a large excess (eg. barrens produced 4 food instead of 2), then while our pop would grow really fast, we still wouldn't anything besides farming either, because assuming the same pop and food reqs, it would take me only one turn to get to 4 population, so a building would mean it would take me take a extra turn to grow pop as well, meaning it wouldn't be worth the cost either.
No matter what the food reqs are, in this system we spend all our labor on farming, and not even on building farms, since it would screw up our population growth.