NO! That is likely to mess your game up even more. This game has a lot of internal timers, and you will not be happy with the (unpredictable, but not fun) results of messing with the external timer.

If you can't access your game for a period of time, two of the game features will cause you some unhappiness when you return: whether or not your peeps are fed, and how trashy and weedy your town becomes without a mayor to do the scut work.

Since I don't know your scenario exactly, I am going to assume that you can't access the game for a week, and you had 8 townies, 16 vegetables planted, and no fruit trees. I'll explain in the spoiler tags what will happen in that case, and how to adjust it to your actual game situation.
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It takes a few days after food is exhausted for the peeps to get hungry, and then they start starving to death one per day. Your peeps eat one fruit or vegetable each day, so for two days your peeps will eat vegetables. After that they'll be out of food, and start to get hungry, but you won't start losing peeps right away. After 5 more days my guess is that you would lose at most one or two peeps, and possibly none.

During that time, weeds and trash will accumulate, and when your beauty meter drops enough, peeps will move out.

You will not lose more than one peep per day. I think that means from any reason, but I don't know, so for a worst case scenario, you might lose one from starving and one from moving out. I don't think you can lose all your peeps even if you leave for a month, but again I'm not sure (and all those skeletons in my VV game might suggest otherwise).

Here are some things you can do to prevent angst in the future:
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Plant fruit trees. Fruit trees bear 3 fruits every 3 days or so, and don't need to be replanted. Even though peeps will survive even if they eat only every third day, what I do is to plant 3 fruit trees every day early in the game until I have 9 trees. Since they bear fruit on a schedule, that means 9 fruits will drop every day forever.

My bet is that just three trees (9 fruits every 3 days) would prevent starvation, but by staggering planting I am hoping for 9 fruits every day. I assume that the same peep wouldn't miss out on getting a fruit every day, so nobody would starve.

I also keep about 60 vegetables planted, but that's just overkill.

As for the trash in town, I activated the town cleanup ordinance but the townies are still pretty lazy. If I had two identical devices I would set up two situations, both with lots of fruit tress and one with and one without that ordinance, and then leave them alone and see what happens. Unfortunately, I don't have the hardware to test that.

Losing a peep or two is not the worst thing, it's just sad when you've become fond of them. If you've survived playing Virtual Families, you can survive losing a peep in Virtual Town! You'll get a new one soon enough and the day will be bright and beautiful again.