Cooked Chicken

Cooked Chicken is a food item made from roasting raw chicken in a furnace or by killing chickens with fire or a sword with the Fire Aspect enchantment. Cooked chicken heals 6 points (3 "shanks") of hunger and 7.2 units of food saturation, making it slightly a better food than bread or cooked fish.

Effects
Eating the chicken raw only restores 1/3 as many hunger points and has a 30% chance of giving the player food poisoning.

Farming
Since chickens are persistent as of Beta 1.8, it is easily possible to create chicken egg farms. Put eggs into dispensers to spawn chickens automatically, then let the chickens fall onto a burning netherrack block and let them run off that block. They will burn to death and drop cooked chicken. This method no longer works due to the Minecraft 1.0RC1 update which made baby chickens hatch from eggs instead of adults.

However, with further use of Cactus-Clock controlled Chambers, it is possible to mature these baby chickens into adults in a fully automated fashion.