Essential Knowledge: Food

Food is definitely essential to surviving in Minecraft. If you have any experience in Minecraft hard mode, then you know that starving to death is a possibility. On normal mode, once your food meter is empty, hunger will rack your health bar until you are down to half a heart. At that point, anything could kill you. Thus, it is very important to be familiar with the food sources in Minecraft. There are a few main divisions of food types: meats, farm foods, stews, craftable items, and a few extraneous consumables.

Meat is the easiest food source to access in Minecraft. Chickens, cows, pigs, and rabbits are scattered liberally across most Minecraft biomes. Swarms of fish populate the oceans and rivers. Once the animals are killed, they drop raw meat. Most raw meats (with the exception of raw chicken and rotten flesh, which is dropped by zombies) can be eaten raw. Raw chicken and rotten flesh, however, have the potential to give you the hunger or poison potion effect, which lowers your food bar (so yeah, follow your intuition and don’t eat rotten food!). The other raw meats won’t hurt you, but if you cooked them they would fill your food bar more.  

Farm foods can usually be found in villages, but then can be transplanted onto a player’s own farm, making them a handy and reliable source of food. There are potatoes, carrots, beets, apples, melons, and wheat. Potatoes can be eaten raw, but like meat, they are more filling if you would cook them first. Carrots can be eaten raw, but also crafted with gold to make golden carrots (see the crafted foods paragraph). Beets can be crafted into stew, which I will discuss in the next paragraph. Apples can be found in villager chests or sometimes drop from oak leaf blocks. Melons aren’t very nutritious, but they grow naturally in jungle biomes. Wheat can be found in villages, but it fits more under the division of crafted foods, so I will discuss wheat later on.

As I mentioned previously, beets can be crafted into stew. Stew is an incredibly annoying food source, because stew bowls are not stackable (meaning each filled bowl takes up a separate inventory slot). But before the 1.16 Nether update, mushroom stew was the only food source available in the Nether, besides the occasional rotten flesh. Mushroom stew is actually pretty filling, and only requires one red and one brown mushroom and a wooden bowl. Suspicious stew, which is often found in chests but is actually craftable, is concocted from one red and one brown mushroom and any type of flower. Eating a suspicious stew is risky, because the consumer gets a random potion effect for a few seconds, meaning you could die from poison if you are already low on health or you could gain fire resistance for a fall into lava. Rabbit stew, a hard-to-come-by delicacy, fills a remarkable 5 hunger bars. Stews are not a reliable resource, but they can offer some adventure and are useful in a pinch.

Stews aren’t the only craftable food in Minecraft. Three pieces of wheat can be crafted into bread, a stackable and vegetarian food source. Cookies are also craftable, but are not very filling. Golden carrots are a result of combining 8 gold ingots and a carrot, and are incredibly filling. Golden apples are formed with an apple and 8 gold ingots, and impart a brief healing effect and temporary extra hearts. Pumpkins, which cannot be eaten raw, can be crafted into pumpkin pies. Cakes are a more unusual food, because in order to eat it you need to place it on a surface and then right click on it. These baked goods and fantasy foods are quite fun to have around.

There are a few other random articles that are consumable in Minecraft. Kelp, which can be found in the ocean, is able to be cooked into dried kelp. Dried kelp an awful food source because it is barely filling, but there is an achievement for surviving on kelp for a set number of days. Sweet berries are similarly not filling, but they are easy to find scattered around a taiga forest. Spider eyes can be eaten, but they give you a brief poison effect. Pufferfish offer up a sturdy resistance to being eaten, inflicting the consumer with hunger, nausea, and poison. Chorus fruits, which are found on End Islands, will teleport you brief distances in random directions. A honey bottle, which is consumable even when your hunger bar is full, removes a poison effect from you. Milk buckets will remove any and all potion effects from you, so be careful using it if you have a strength or healing potion equipped, because the milk would remove them. Sweet berries, honey bottles, and milk buckets are the only non-harming random food sources.

Food is useful for one other purpose besides being eaten: food can be used to breed animals. Potatoes, beets, and carrots fed to pigs will cause them to breed. Any kind of seed can be fed to chickens. Wheat can be fed to cows and sheep, and wild llamas (NOT trader llamas) will eat hay bales and subsequently procreate.

I hope this information will be useful to you! This post was long, but I felt it was necessary to mention all the food sources. Just like in real life, food is essential to Minecraft, and the variety of foods included in the game can offer a steep learning curve as well as an adventure.