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 ⅓ as many hunger points and has a 30% chance of giving the player food poisoning.

Advantages

 * Cooked Chicken restores a fairly good amount of hunger and saturation.
 * Chickens are more common than other passive mobs, as well as giving eggs to speed up farming.
 * Farming chickens also provides feathers and eggs.

Disadvantages

 * Other meats restore more hunger and saturation than cooked chicken.
 * Eggs hatch into baby chickens, which need to grow before they are farmed.

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.