DISCLAIMER: I am not a pro or an expert, this is just my thinking and opinions. I make a lot of assumptions about how normal games go in order to compare things here. Feel free to challenge these if you think I'm way off.

TLDR: Long post ahead. If you don't want to read the whole thing, my main points/conclusions are in bold. The rest of the text is explaining my reasoning.

So I've been maining Abbasid since launch (around 1300 if that matters) and I've gone back and forth a lot on which wings from the House of Wisdom (HoW) are best in different situations. At first glance, the economic wing appeared to be the no-brainer feudal age choice due to the Fresh Foodstuffs (FF) tech. You're always making villagers, so a 50% discount seems like a huge deal, but I want to show that it might not be the best tech choice in every game and that it definitely doesn't deserve a nerf as I've seen suggested by some people.

So what does the tech actually give you? Fresh Foodstuffs is like a one time offer to overpay for 2 villagers per town center.

Okay, let me explain why I believe this is a good way to think about it. It normally takes ~4 villagers on sheep with no upgrades to maintain villager production. FF cuts your cost of producing villagers in half, so now you would only need 2, freeing up the other 2 to stockpile more food or gather another resource. Which brings me to my point: for 50 food and 125 gold you get 2 "invisible villagers". Note that I've been assuming one TC up to now. For every extra TC you are producing villagers out of, you get 2 more "invisible villagers".

Now, is this a good deal? Of course it is! Getting villagers without taking up your TC time is amazing and if you plan on making 2 or 3 TCs then you start getting a lot of benefit. But I want to compare it to the other feudal age HoW techs and to other civilizations' bonuses to put the value of FF into perspective:

Lets try to compare the economic value of FF to the culture wing feudal age tech, Preservation of Knowledge (PoK). PoK reduces the price of all future techs by 30% and costs the same as FF (50 food, 125 gold). I think its pretty obvious that this sees the most value in a booming game where you have the time and spare income to research lots of economic and military techs. To keep things more simple, I'm going to make a lot of assumptions about what kind of techs you would get in an "average game", but of course this would vary by game and the 30% cost reduction is a way bigger deal for the expensive late game techs. Anyway, lets say in a ~25 minute game where you reach imperial age, you get the following techs: wheelbarrow, 1st line of eco upgrades, 1st and 2nd line of blacksmith upgrades, 2 veteran unit upgrades, 2 elite unit upgrades, and 2 military wing techs (Boot Camp and Camel Support). If I haven't messed up the math, Preservation of Knowledge would save you just over 2000 resources in a ~25 minute game and from here, you will save an additional 300 resources for each late game tech, such as Biology or Chemistry.

How does that compare to what FF would save you over a similar game. I think the easiest way to compare them is to say that FF saves you 25 resources per villager created after researched. You would usually complete FF when you have about 30 villagers and I think a standard late game villager count is about 110, meaning you would get your 25 food savings on 80 of them. Using these assumptions we can say that over a game where you make 110 villagers Fresh Foodstuffs will save you ~2000 resources. Note that FF stops gaining you value once you've reached your desired max villager count, assuming you don't lose villagers.

So what does this mean in practice? The resources saved by FF and PoK are very similar over a "normal" game, but PoK will start to outperform in the late game when techs cost more. One idea on how to use this knowledge is to say you should get FF in feudal and PoK in castle or imperial age to get the best value out of both. This is especially true if you plan to get a fast 2nd TC as you will gain the FF savings faster. Another way to think about it is that PoK is better if you are building less villagers overall, like on a water/hybrid map where fishing replaces some of your economy and the PoK discount would be nice for dock techs. I haven't mentioned the military or trade wing here, but of course there is considerations for them as well. You will probably get the military wing at some point in every game, but the trade wing is a little more niche, but still useful in some cases. In general, I think that blindly going eco wing 1st for Fresh Foodstuffs is not the optimal play in every game and your choices should depend on the map, matchup, and your playstyle.

Finally, I want to quickly compare FF to some other civs eco bonuses. One thing to keep in mind here is that the Abbasids get no immediate unique bonus for aging up, they only get the opportunity to research more things. Most civs get some kind of bonus from their landmarks, like the English for example, effectively save 300 wood just by building their Council Hall.

Lets look at the French, who make villagers faster based on what age they are in, and compare that to the "2 invisible villagers" of the Abbasid with FF. I'm going to assume both players have 1 TC to keep things simple. If an Abbasid player ages up at ~5min and immediately researches FF, they will gain their 2 extra villagers at 6min and only gain any more extra villagers if they build more town centers. A French player on the same timeline will have 1.5 extra villagers due to their civ bonus by 5min, 3.75 extra villagers by 10min, and will continue to out-scale as the game goes on. I want to reiterate that the Abbasids have to build a certain landmark wing and then research things to get most of their civ bonuses, as opposed to most other civs which innately have their bonuses for free. We could look at more examples from other civs, like the Rus gaining free gold from animals or the HRE prelate effectively multiplying your villager count, but this post is already huge lol. I think this shows that the bonus from Fresh Foodstuffs is not out of line with the eco bonuses of other civs and definitely does not deserve a nerf as some people have suggested.

I'd love to hear if people agree or disagree. Also, I really didn't mean for this post to get so long, it just kinda happened.. so big thanks to anyone who actually reads this whole monstrosity!