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.