Tutorials/Quick ways to get food

Eating food is one of the main mechanics in Minecraft. But a player may run out of food when they're out of their base and start starving. This tutorial focuses on some of the fastest ways to get some food.

Killing meat animals
Several animals found wandering around will drop meat when they are killed, and if they are killed with fire they will drop cooked meat which is more nourishing. Note that this includes salmon and cod, which are especially plentiful in rivers or oceans (but watch out for pufferfish).

This list shows mobs, food from them when they are killed without fire and food from them when they are killed by fire:

Cooked food have better saturation and restore more hunger than raw meat. Player can kill mobs with fire using Fire Aspect or Flame enchantments, flint and steel, fire charges, lava (although this may burn the items that are dropped from the mob) or some naturally generated fire in the nether. Most fish can be tricky to set alight (being underwater) but sometimes it is actually possible.

Looting a Village
Offer many food sources: Depending on biome, most have hay bales lying around, which can be crafted into wheat, then bread (1 Hay Bale = 9 Wheat = 3 Bread =  food points). Those which don't have hay bales may have pumpkins or melons instead (see below). Their farms offer all four of the basic crops, and the chests in their houses can offer several food items.

These food items can be found in the village chests:

Foraging
There are several food items that can be gathered from the landscape with varying degrees of ease. Which of these are available will depend on the biomes you pass through. Note that except for mushroom stew, these are not very good foods, filling your hunger bar but offering little saturation to back it up. That said, they'll keep you from starvation until you can find something better.

Mushroom Stew
Brown and red mushrooms can be found in various places throughout the world, mostly under trees or in caves. They are also common in the Nether. A bit of wood allows you to craft bowls, and with a bowl and both mushroom types, you can easily craft mushroom stew, without even needing a crafting table. If you happen to be in the rare Mushroom Fields, you can also get mushroom stew by "milking" a mooshroom with an empty bowl, though the mushrooms themselves will also be plentiful. (In the mushroom fields, the wood for a bowl might be the hardest to find!) This is one of the best foraged foods, with value comparable to some cooked meats. Its main drawback is that once crafted, it is unstackable. However, the ingredients are stackable, and three slots will hold the makings for 64 bowls of stew. Note that you do get the bowl back when you eat the stew, so it's perfectly reasonable to carry a large amount of each mushroom type, and one craft's worth of 4 bowls to fill as needed.

Adding a flower to the crafting will instead produce suspicious stew, which is just as nourishing and also grants a brief status effect. It matters a lot which flower you use, as some of them produce bad effects:


 * A dandelion or blue orchid will give the "saturation" effect, promoting your stew to a superfood!
 * An oxeye daisy will let you regenerate a few points of health, while a lily-of-the-valley will poison you, doing several points of damage.
 * Other flowers offer various good or bad effects, but all lasting just a few seconds.

Sweet Berries
Spawning in/near a taiga biome allows you to get early access to sweet berries which are a weak but plentiful food source and easy to farm. However, the bushes can be hazardous -- avoid walking through them.

Apples (Leaves)
When cutting down oak or dark oak trees, a few of the leaves (1 in 200 of the blocks) will drop apples as they decay. You can also manually break the leaf blocks.

Melons
In jungles, you can likely find melon blocks, which can be broken into melon slices. These are a weak food, but can be plentiful, especially since unused slices can be crafted into seeds to (eventually) grow more melons.

Pumpkin Pie
If you happen to have the ingredients, pumpkin pie is a relatively cheap and filling food item, crafted with only one pumpkin, sugar (from sugar cane), and an egg. All of these can be farmed in mass quantities. One thing troublesome is finding the pumpkins in the first place, but once that's done, there are no real challenges. They can also be crafted without a Crafting Table, requiring only three ingredients.

Rotten Flesh
Rotten flesh is one of the most common and least-valued items in the game. Most often found after killing zombies and their various relatives (or waiting for them to burn in the morning), it can also show up chest loot. It is a bottom-tier food, which furthermore has an 80% chance to inflict "food poisoning" -- 30 seconds of the Hunger effect. However, that duration doesn't accumulate, and it doesn't cost all that much hunger. So, if you eat several pieces at once, you can fill up your hunger gauge, perhaps heal a bit, and only lose a little saturation "off the top". Drinking milk right after eating rotten flesh will also cancel the effect.

In the Nether
It is challenging to find food in the Nether, but there are still some (if not somewhat unreliable) available food sources within the "bowels of hell."

Anywhere

 * Mushroom stew is still a good option: Both kinds of mushrooms are common, and bowls can be made from giant fungus planks (the red and blue "trees").  Alas, flowers are not to be found unless you brought some from the Overworld.
 * Rotten flesh (see above) can be had from zombified piglins; the problem is that if you fight one of them, you basically have to fight all of them. You can do pretty well with a prepared fort where you can hold them off and kill them from safety, but watch out for interfering ghasts. To kill zombified piglins be two blocks higher than the ground. So, they can’t attack you.

Hoglins

 * Hoglins are the only real "meat animal" found in the Nether (barring the occasional chicken jockey). They spawn in crimson forests, and in some bastions.  Unfortunately they're hostile, and fairly tough. As a hint, they can't fit through one-block wide doorways, and unlike many Nether mobs, they are not immune to fire.  When killed, a Hoglin will drop 2-4 porkchops, more than the Overworld pig.  Killing the hoglin with fire, or cooking a raw porkchop, gets you one of the best foods in the game.

Bastion Remnants
A Bastion Remnant is a fairly rare structure, but loaded with chests if you do happen to find one. The chests within include pork, and (in Java Edition) golden carrots and golden apples. Note that Piglins will object to your looting or breaking chests -- of course, they'll be attacking you anyway unless you are wearing golden armor (see their page for details), and the Piglin Brutes won't even care about the armor. The easiest option is likely to just block them out of the room -- if you are wearing even one piece of golden armor, the non-brutes will calm down after about 30 seconds.

In the End
The End is a very hostile place, and is extremely hard to find food in. You should bring plenty of food with you whenever venturing into the End; the only edible thing you'll find there is chorus fruit; that grows only on the outer islands, but is plentiful there. It does have a little side effect....

Chorus Plants
They only grow on the Outer End Islands, so you'll need to kill the Ender Dragon first to get them. They restore four food points, but can also teleport you to a random location, up to 8 blocks away. This can either be a great convenience or an annoyance. The trees are very common in the End islands, and with a little effort you can easily farm them as well.