I know a way to get the food up so for the next few days when you leave the game leave it on pause over night until you chief creat magic food every 24 hours I did this with my 4th game I started and paused it every day and got my chief to creat magicly creat food and it worked so after a week I had 2000 food and my villagers only age 1 Isola year So my villagers did not worry about food any more and got on with reseaching and building.

This is absolutely not normal; trees, once grown, never un-grow themselves; they just regenerate a little fruit over time.

This is most likely due to your manipulation of the system clock -- as CFII says, it's very easy for even a single farmer to strip trees and honey so thoroughly that you'll never see them at levels higher than 7 or 8 fruit. (At which point my villagers seem to stop harvesting fruit.)

Thank you for all your advice. It's just a little disappointing not to have some sort of farm like they did in the first two games! Oh well, they're back to 2500 food after a LOT of fishing!
thanks again!