Actually its nothing to do with 1.154/1.153....the food bug is introduced by the 0.93 patch, it also assigns the healing/wound treatment stuff to oil and salt.
My only real idea here looking at the differential between the patch files and the mod files that get patched is that the 0.93 item_kinds1.txt has 1205 entries whereas the patch version has 1201...the -4 being the removal of the tourney outfits from that file. Other small changes are present but nothing about food items are affected in the file.
The only thing I can really assume (I'm not a WB modder though I am a scripter and modder of other games) here is that somehow the changes in the patch are offsetting values which are assigning improper attributes to items further into the file. Which makes a certain kind of logical sense because the items that are loading below the tourney outfits that were simply cut out of the file are actually the books in the game that give bonuses to the player while in inventory and whats right below those books? Food items.
So I think largely what I'm going to try next here is fixing the 0.93 item_kinds1.txt file with just the changes to actual armors and not removing the tourney outfits....because I think its the block removal of those items that is causing the offset.
This of course won't fix farmers being non-existent but one set of problems at a time I suppose.
EDIT:
I merged all the changes from the 0.93 patch item_kinds1.txt into the 0.93 version and left the tourney outfits in place in the file. With my adapted item_kinds1.txt and the troops.txt from the patch everything appears to function correctly. All consumable foods have the appropriate morale bonuses associated with them, and the units have their appropriate gear.
I'm not entirely sure what the removal of the tournament outfits was supposed to achieve and the last changelog associated with the mod is for 0.92 so I'm not sure what that change in the 0.93 patch was supposed to address but it did cause some pretty major data offset problems in the items table.
Here is my fixed version of the item_kinds1.txt file which fixes the bug with food. Just cut and paste it into the item_kinds1.txt file in the ACOK93 directory and save the file, also be sure you're using the troops.txt file from the patch.
Pastebin of my fixed ACOK93 item_kinds1.txt
It could be that the removal of the arena tunics was done with good reason but I can't really justify offsetting the table balance for everything below the removal unless whatever the arena tunics are doing is a massive problem (I haven't had time to test a tournament yet).
I'll continue to test and see what else I can try to address.