You know...I am probably wrong but have given quite a bit of thought about how this game really runs and what I think happens is that even though it was paused (and they didn't actually get any hungrier while it was paused) as soon as you unpause the game, the game instantly "sets the time to your current time" and automatically figures in what would have happened if they had gone all those hours without food.

I wonder if maybe Arthur or Lady could give us some insight into why this happened in your game. But {{hugs}} to you because you must have felt awful. Just remember that you didn't mean for it to happen and tried to make sure they were going to be okay.