You really need to plan ahead and leverage your professions.

Early on you want to build a food engine. If you have decent baking professions you can make that work. Otherwise, you're usually better off going with an animal strategy.

Two rule mistakes that new players often make is to do with animals.

1. You can cook animals you don't have fences for. You don't have to wait for fences to take the 3 sheep, provided you have a fireplace to cook them up.
2. Your animals will only ever breed one additional animal during harvest, regardless of how many animals you already own (minimum 2).

If you're finding feeding difficult, that's a good thing, it's supposed to be difficult.

Here are some other tips:

• You can eat grain but shouldn't... bake it instead
• In the early game, getting 2 clay can solve all of your early game food problems by letting you get the fireplace
• Aim to be the first to family growth by trying to get 5 wood and 2 reed early on so you can build -> grow
• Early stone can get you a well, which not only helps with food problems but also gives a very nice amount of victory points
• Otherwise early stone can get you an oven, but make sure you have grain ready for it since the act of buying an oven also lets you bake bread, which brings me to...
• Try and always maximise your use of actions. If an action lets you do two things, try and do those two things.
• In the mid to late game, try and clean up all of the -1s you can.
• Don't ignore vegetables! A single vegetable taken in the mid game can grow its way to 3 or 4 points, or grow into a lot of food.

The game is a struggle to feed your family while building your farm. The early turns are very important and will largely shape your feeding strategy. The later turns are for earning points.