It is a well-known fact that food can spread through "seeds", small loot drops that eventually grow into more food plants wherever they are left.
Usually these seeds are useless for humans, unless you intend on eating them too, but by building dirt paths over a massive patch of land then hitting dropped seeds on the paths with a long flat tool or your fists, you can forcibly glitch the seeds through the paths and wedge them between the path and the ground. The game counts this as the seeds being "underground" allows them to grow. This only works with dirt path buildings as no other building has the fertility value that allows for food growth.
Some players have started to name things related to their infinite food farms. To build the dirt paths, for instance, is to "till the soil", and to glitch the seeds underground is called "planting". tools such as the "hoe", an unfortunate name though not surprising given the playerbase, helps with the planting process.
To keep food plants alive players have built the "water bucket" item and dumped it over the growing food, which simulates rainfall even in arid regions of the map. Other players have reported a success in digging channels for water to flow around food plants in.
