I know I've messed up because I tried altering the clock and I started new games without doing that but my problem of not having enough food still persists. The crops take a long time to grow...Any tips?

You don't say how long your crops are taking to grow. They should appear every 4 hours on normal speed. One thing that will get you into trouble with the food supply is growing your population too much before your villagers are able to fish. If you have more than a dozen or so villagers with only the berry bush and the farm, food will be a problem.

one of the games it's taking 300 minutes and im down to 8 food.

300 minutes is OK if you're running the game on 1/2 speed (and you probably should be running at that speed if you're down to 8 food). The villagers will eat less on 1/2 speed, and it helps to conserve food. If you're running the game on a faster speed, and you still have 300 minutes left, you're probably seeing the results of system clock changes.

for the moment, i wouls suggest putting the game on half speed, and keeping any kids you have on mushroom duty. when you see a mushie, pause the game and pile all the kids on top of it.

i only have one child. I think the problem is that when the time restarts for the crops, there are no crops.

well, use the child you have to try to get the mushies...

if you don't want to scrap the village, the only other thing you can do is to put the other villagers on research, watch them closely, and when they do the little side step, pick them up and drop them back on the table...you might be able to get enough points to buy the last farming tech before they starve, esp if you also keep the kid on mushroom duty and maybe pray for the right event to help you!

Well, THAT's going to make it hard to get enough food. It sounds like there might be "remnants" of the ill effects caused by adjusting your system clock lurking somewhere. You might want to consider starting completely fresh, which is easily accomplished by going into the Virtual Villagers folder (usually in Program Files), locating files named Isola**.ldw (where ** is a number) and deleting them. If you don't want to delete those files, you can move them to some other folder for safekeeping. Once those files are no longer in the Virtual Villagers folder, launching the game will start you completely over, just like when you first installed the game. You might also want to make sure that your system clock is operating normally.