Do not try to store food during AR, you will likely need all of the food to feed off the 1- / 2-star heroes you pick up while farming. Likewise, do not collect any TC output during AR. You will need all the food just for the feeders coming in from farming. Watch out for when a hero is approaching an ascension threshold because that is what eats up most of your food supply, not the feeding of 1- / 2-stars. Whatever is left goes into stuffing a TC queue with recruits you farm. It would be more efficient to build a TC2 queue if you have enough / farm enough backpacks to stuff a full month of TC2 production to keep it running from one month’s AR to the next month’s AR.
If you are instead stuffing a HA troop queue to eat up the recruits similar advice goes for this strategy though it should be easier to balance. AR only lasts 3 days so I doubt you will have to worry about processing a HA10 retraining. You would simply stuff a HA6 queue when your iron is getting full and otherwise use TC11/TC2.
AR is actually a better time to distribute emblems if you haven’t been assigning them as they come in. Or resetting emblems on heroes if you’ve been sitting on the fence for a switch. The ham and iron rolling through your inventory is better served there than in any storage queue IMO.