It's really not THAT bad.

For instance... if it takes 24 hours for 100%, then each hour they regen roughly 4.2%. A level 7 barb town has 5m food at full, thus every hour it regens 210k food. That's half of what a max storage town will do. For somebody like me who has 3 level 5 barb towns around him, that's an extra like 400k each hour. That's nearly as much as my town produces, even if it's not the 9m per hour it used to be.

I understand why people are upset, and why it's so annoying, since it came suddenly, but it's still not as bad as people make it out to be. With the food stocks that've been built up, if you start supplimenting your farms now, and begin farming barbs now at a percentage of what they used to give, you'll still do very well.