I think I figured out the food issue I was having, there seems to be some sort of priority on the food you start with. So if you move far away from spawn you have to make sure to make hauling the start food is the top priority because the people "think" they need to eat those first and will starve before they will eat freshly crafted food? Anyway not sure why I keep losing my menus but none of the buttons will pull them up and I can't get the exit menu as the escape button just pauses the game to I have to kill it manually making me have to start a new world.
I think the issue is with the UI scaling in the current version. Go to your users/(your account)/appdata/locallow/embark/embark/config folder and delete the optionsinfo.xml file inside. 0.3 is coming very soon and should fix this too.
For the food, that shouldn't be possible, they search for food starting from items closest to them. Could it be because the food is inaccessible somehow? They can only walk up or down one block at a time.