After some playtime on the Vodyani, they're the only race I really worry about food buildings for, and that's because they have half the growth rate & require 1200 food to grow a single pop. Even then, after about 3-4 pop it starts exploding.

The de-emphasis on food improvements is rather depressing, especially since it means numerous techs (and the main focus of the Environmentalist party) are nearly useless.

I'm on my second game; on my third, I'm going to try never build a food building.

 I tend to skip all the food tech. Every planet seems to grow quickly without it.

Definitely in agreement, population growth is radically out of control. Every turn I have pop growth in several different systems and I never spend a single tech or improvement on food.  That seems really broken.  On anything other than a breadbasket type world, we should have to invest to get decent growth.  I seem to average about 4 turns per pop per system, that seems extremely fast.  It might be partly due to how happiness mechanics work.  It doesn't seem very hard to have ecstatic population through all of the early-mid game.

While toning down population growth may be in the cards, how about giving more options for food based strategies. I hear slave labor is pretty expensive on the populace but can do wonders. Maybe it's time to take a page from the Druuge and put some of those excess meat wagons in the furnace? A little mass blood sacrifice might also grant favor from a dark force. It's a big universe, you never know.

Pop increase definitely needs to be turned down. Right now, I find myself not being able to properly use space ports because all of my planets are full, and if I use the pop to manpower option, a new pop has replaced them in two turns

I have personally noticed that ES2 pop mechanics are far to spam heavy. Compunded with the fact that colony ships no longer consume population, i find it is too easy to grow a system. Frankly i think its too easy to gain dust as well.

I could not agree more.  In EL and ES1, I treasured each pop increase, and could not wait to redistribute the new pop.  In this current stage of the Alpha, I feel like I'm "drowning" in pop by doing nothing at all towards growth.

And this carries over to manpower also.  When playing around with planet invasions, I just could not run out of troops/tanks/plains no matter how often I invaded.  

And again this carries over to pop transferring.  You almost never need too, because planets almost grow faster than the time to transport more pop it.