Banished – How Much Food Does a Person Need Each Year?

"Having Food" is not synonymous with "Being able to Eat food".

If you have plenty of surplus, and still people dying to starvation, the problem likely exists within your supply chain. In my experience, this usually means people are involved in pathing very long distances, such that they starve on their way home to eat.

Use the info panel to follow starving citizens. Where are they going? Where are they coming from? I've seen at more than one Let's Play where folks have mistakenly designated buildings far away, long before a sane path to reach them exists -- the end result was people walking towards the structure, giving up 75% of the way there when hunger kicked in, starting back, and dying before they reached their homes.

Managing population fluctuations, both local and city-wide, is one of the biggest challenges of Banished. But with the right technique, it isn't one which can't be overcome.

When you need some household to migrate to another location, build a new house for them in the new location and just before the new house is finished, order their old house to get removed. They will then become homeless and migrate to the new house the moment it is finished.

Single households are in fact quite handy in this regard, because they give you a higher flexibility (you can move a single worker and don't have to move two at the same time). The downside is, of course, that more houses require more resources to build and more fuel to keep warm.

As a result of population fluctuations you will soon notice that workers who used to live close to their jobs will switch jobs and have suddenly a new job which is far more remote. To solve this issue you should regularly (every couple years) unassign all jobs by making everyone laborers and then reassign the desired number of workers to each occupation, starting with those where you consider proximity most critical. When you add a worker to an occupation, the laborer closest to an open job of that occupation will be converted, so by reassigning regularly you can re-optimize who does which job.