I think the real problem is this: I have a good sized army, not the best, not the biggest, however..
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/4043/hungrym.jpg
with just this portion of my army I parked in this lvl 10 NPC, you can see that even if I abandoned every city I made, and took lvl 10 NPCs (except my starter city, but I guess I could do that too) and left all the resources plots as food only, even with ALL LVL10 I *still* couldn't feed my army. This is why barring all other things, if they refuse to change this patch they need to at least fix farms to produce a useful amount of food.