After reading this thread, I decided to try out the food caravans (I'd only used them for wonders before). The carevans worked as advertised, until I decided the time came to get rid of the food routes.

When I tried establishing a third trade route, it would displace one of the earlier two--the food route wouldn't budge. I checked the manual, which assured me that if a city ran out of food, the route would cancel automatically. So, I took all the workers off food producing squares, and let the stores drain to zero (I have democracy blessed with perpetual WLT*Ds, so I wasn't worried).

The first two cities worked as advertised. The next one started disbanding engineers instead ; I re-supported the engineers to other cities, and tried again--The route died this time. Every other city with a food route (five, all to my Capital/Science City) has defied all efforts to dislodge the route. They lose population instead!

I now produce nothing but trade caravans from those cities...but have given up on 'starving them out'.

Never thought about trying to starve them out tho... What I ended up doing [in a SP game] was building a food caravan every turn... [it was over 20 population] and sending them off around the globe.

One thing I didn't pay attention too [game now finished] was once I established a different food route, did it change the +1 food to the new towns?!

This made my population really grow with the help of granaries in Fundy.

And I agree that this is one way to keep up with the WLT?D in Demo and Rep. But, again, it is something to agree before a game begins...

The humger emptied the food box and I got the "famine feared" message but then nothing happened! The food box was empty, the food routes were still there and the population never fell. Despite the 1 hunger, the food route was never cancelled and the population never fell. This was very odd.