Create Food and it's effect on infrastructure

[kirbwarrior]

Been working on a fantasy-medieval* setting and learning things about it from various campaigns. Two things that came up (initially unrelated) was trying to figure out population size (since it seems lower than I thought would normally make sense but is something I like) and the fact that there isn't farming because it would be too hard for various purposes. The second already had a solution; Creating food was a spell people would learn early on in history to make up for many places either being too barren for food OR too dangerous because scarier things eat the same food.

I started looking up worldbuilding advise online and apparently how available and how easy to get food is has a gigantic effect on things. But a lot of that advise was based around the assumption that farming more or less worked the same regardless of other parts of the setting.

And I'm not sure what I could base it on or how much of an effect it would have. For simplicity, lets say that making food is roughly as time consuming and hard as making a meal would be, but you never have to worry about actually getting food because you're creating meals into existence. Any thoughts on how to approach this? Thank you ahead of time.

*Maybe more accurately renaissance, or TL4 in GURPS (I posted here since the game mechanics seemed irrelevant)