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 and may kill you after enough has been eaten. Food poisoning seems to make your food saturation level decrease faster as well. You can cure your poisoning by using 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.
 * 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.
 * Rotten Flesh can be used to feed wolves instead of other foods you can use for your own benefit.

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.
 * After a currently unknown amount is eaten over any amount of time you will die.

Trivia

 * Before Rotten Flesh was added, Zombies dropped Feathers. This was because feathers were added before Chickens, and there was no other way to obtain feathers at that time.
 * In Alpha and Beta, Zombie Pigmen dropped Cooked Porkchops instead of Rotten flesh and Gold Nuggets.
 * There is a certain amount of irony to the fact that zombie flesh is edible, if somewhat toxic, as zombies are typically portrayed as being the ones to feed on human flesh.