Postby akkamaddi » Sat Oct 28, 2017 10:47 pm
This is not an answer to your question, but is only tangentially related: If you do the ongoing action "City Planning", which increases population growth (and increases happiness of refugees, making them assimilate faster), the planet's food consumption doubles as long as City Planning is in effect. Because of that, you have to be careful using City Planing on several planets if you are close to your food limit.
Also, planets can share food, if you have shuttles. Shuttles in the shuttle pool will move food from planets with to planets without, automatically. (I don't think distance or travel time matters here.) Food takes priority over trade, so that will cut back on money they earn, but starvation can cause riots. This is one of the reasons it's good to get a large fleet of shuttles in the trade pool (sooner the better). You can reserve planets for a specific function and they won't starve, or you can have a supergrain-fueled breadbasket planet feeding surrounding systems.
The total food excess shown in the top bar of the galaxy display shows you how close you are to starvation events, if you have enough shuttles to distribute food.