One successful strategy for getting your village going is to put two villagers to work foraging for food and the rest of the villagers working at the research table. If you make sure that each villager has the appropriate Preferred Skill checked, they should stay more focused on the task, and you should be able to purchase Harvesting L2 before your village runs out of food. If the berry bush does happen to run out before you can purchase Level 2 of Harvesting, you can temporarily assign your farmers to do research to help with the points, then put them back to farming once you have crops. You should also hold off on growing your population until you get farming, because the kids eat as much as the adults. If you start the game on easy, you'll get 6 villagers (and that will give you an extra person to do research)!

I've never had villagers starve using that strategy.