Rotten Flesh

Rotten Flesh is a food item dropped by Zombies and Zombie Pigmen. Eating it restores some of your hunger meter. However, Rotten Flesh has an 80% chance of causing food poisoning. Food poisoning seems to make your food saturation level decrease faster as well. You can cure your poisoning with a bucket of Milk.

Rotten Flesh cannot be cooked or used in any crafting recipes.

Rotten flesh heals Wolves without poisoning or causing damage to them. Zombies drop 0-2 pieces of rotten flesh upon death.

Advantages

 * Rotten Flesh is rather easy to get once one has a sword/bow and armor, as zombies are more common than passive mobs.

Disadvantages

 * Rotten Flesh has a 80% chance to trigger the "Hunger" potion effect, making hunger fast-forwarded for 30 seconds.
 * Rotten Flesh only restores and cannot be cooked.

Trivia

 * The food poisoning effect does not stack, so using multiple rotten flesh from no food points can get you up to 9 food points, since you will only suffer the poisoning of the last piece of flesh consumed.
 * Because of the above, rotten flesh can be a good emergency food when other sources are depleted if used in high dosages, restoring more hunger than the poison can take away.
 * Before the Beta 1.8 update, Zombies dropped Feathers. This was meant as a placeholder until Notch thought of a more suitable drop.
 * In Alpha and Beta, Zombie Pigmen dropped Cooked Porkchops instead of Rotten flesh and Gold Nuggets.