Early in the game, your Empire’s most immediate needs will be grain, livestock, and fish.  Each of your industrial workers, military units, and ships must eat one unit of one of these commodities every turn.  If units are not fed, they will eventually starve to death.

Together grain, meat, and fish are considered food. Food does not appear on the trade screen and cannot be purchased on the world market. This means that your transport network and the orders you give on the transport screen must feed your entire population each turn.

Sometimes when you start a new game it may take several turns before your Empire can feed everyone reliably.  The amount of food you receive each turn at the start of the game depends on the quality of your capital city site and on the difficulty setting you choose.

In most cases it will be possible to use the stockpiled food in your warehouse to feed your population while your builders and engineers expand the transport network. In rare cases you may want to disband military units to avoid starvation of you industrial workers.  If a unit of population starves, it will be taken first from industry. This is dangerous at the beginning of the game because only consistent production from industry can get your development off to a fast start.