You may be right. Part of my bias against food is that unhappiness in satellites cities can occur a lot on higher difficulties, and that just wrecks your growth so much that the effective food your getting is much less than it might look on paper. Also food's value craters very hard compared to most other yields. It takes a lot of food to grow a city past like pop 12, and you get ever reducing benefits (cities work their best tiles first, so later pop get "crappier" yields).
However, since this is capital food, which almost never has unhappiness issues, you get the full monty. This combined with how early in the game this is, where that extra growth can still really do some good.