Tutorials/Hunger management

Hunger is a feature in Minecraft that requires you to eat in order to survive. Hunger is represented by a bar next to the health bar. Negative effects happen when the bar is partially or completely depleted. When the bar has 8.5 or less units, health will stop regenerating. When no more hunger points are left, you will take damage until a certain amount of hearts are left (zero on hard mode). This tutorial will help you keep it full.

IMPORTANT: The visible hunger bar is only one of two aspects of hunger. Each food item you eat also adds to an invisible "saturation bar". As long as your saturation level is above zero, your hunger bar will not drop, so the true value of food depends on both. See the main Hunger article for more.

Effects of Hunger
There are two hunger variables you need to worry about: Your visible hunger bar, and an hidden value which is officially miscalled "saturation". Both range from 0 to 20 (hunger is shown in half-shanks), but saturation cannot exceed your hunger. As you move about, fight, mine, etc, saturation drains away, and when saturation reaches zero, your hunger starts to drain away in its place. In order, the things that will hunger you the most are a "sprint jump", sprinting any distance, attacking monsters or receiving damage (from any source), and jumping. (To be pedantic: sprinting two meters costs the same hunger as jumping once, sprinting three meters costs as much as taking damage or making an attack.)

When your hunger drops below 90%, you stop healing automatically. When it drops below 30%, you will be unable to sprint. And when your hunger drops to 0, you start taking damage from your health. On Easy mode, starvation damage will not lower you below half your maximum health, while on Normal mode, it can reduce you to a single hit point. On Hard mode, starvation can kill. Oddly, the Protection enchantment on armor can reduce starvation damage.

While eating is essential to keep your health up, it is not always needed. On Easy and Normal modes the health bar will stop before dying, so if the player takes care not to take any damage, they may still do whatever they were doing. In fact, many players drain their hunger to 0 whilst making a farm. This is much less safe in multiplayer servers with PvP, much less when adventuring.

Except for golden apples, you cannot eat when your hunger is at max; when you do eat, each food item restores a specific amount of hunger and saturation. Many items restore more saturation than hunger, but remember that saturation is limited by hunger. Thus, it's better to eat such "meaty" items when your hunger bar is nearly full, so that you will gain more saturation. Remember that "wasting" hunger is not an issue, because you would be losing it soon anyway, and when you are losing visible hunger, your saturation is always 0 anyway, so better to fill the hidden meter.

Food
Food is a specific type of item that can be eaten by clicking with the mouse. Food fills up the hunger bar and different foods fill different amounts. Certain foods have special effects. You can obtain food through crafting, farming, and killing mobs.

Cookies
Restores 

Formerly a trophy item, these now (as of snapshot 12w19a and version 1.3.1) are a cheap small-change food. They are easy to craft, and 8 cookies are created per crafting. Since each cookie now fills, a single recipe restores as much hunger as a cooked porkchop or steak, and has a better wheat-to-hunger ratio than bread. However, they provide only a fraction as much saturation as any of those, so you will be hungry again much sooner.

Beef/Porkchop
Restores (raw) and  (cooked)

Beef and porkchops are both easily obtainable during the first few days of playing in singleplayer. They are dropped (raw) by pigs and cows. When cooked by a furnace, or by killing the animal with fire, they fill more than if raw. Since animals spawn rarely, it is recommended you start farming after the first few days.

Chicken
Restores (raw) and  (cooked)

Another type of meat that can be obtained by killing chickens. When raw there is a chance that it can cause food poisoning, which drains your hunger bar quickly, so it is recommended to cook it unless you really have no choice. It is fairly easy to get because chickens aren't rare animals and can easily be farmed with eggs. Killing a chicken with fire gives a cooked chicken.

Apple
Restores 

Apples are a fairly rare food item which appear in chests and oak tree leaves rarely when they are destroyed or decay. They drop from oak tree leaves about 0.5% of the time. Apples are easy to harvest if you have a tree farm (chop down trees, then replant with a sapling). Apples are a fairly reliable source of food in the first few days of adventure when farms aren't established yet, as it is a by-product of harvesting wood from oak trees.

Golden Apple
Restores 

One of the easiest way to obtain a Golden Apple is to take 8 Golden Nuggets and an Apple and make a Golden Apple. The less predictable way is to find a Dungeon. Dungeons have Chests with various items, and if you get extremely lucky, there may just be a golden apple in it. A Golden Apple will accelerate your health regeneration for four seconds regardless of whether or not your hunger bar is full. As of snapshot 12w21a you can make an enchanted golden apple with 8 gold blocks instead of nuggets. This provides much faster and longer-lasting health regeneration, as well as the Resistance and Fire Resistance potion effects.

Bread
Restores 

Bread is one of the most commonly used foods, and is also one of the most renewable. Easy to make, it is crafted from farmable wheat, and four bread will fill one's hunger bar completely. Tall Grass needs to be destroyed in order to obtain the seeds necessary for farming wheat. One downside is that wheat farming is slow in the beginning. Without bone meal, it takes a few days to establish a wheat farm.

Cake
Restores (per slice eaten, 6 slices total)

Cake is the only food that must be placed before eating. However, cake is harder to craft than most food items, requiring three milk buckets, sugar, wheat, and an egg. Cake is not stackable in your inventory. It is recommended that you keep cakes in a place that you travel a lot for quick healing.

Fish
Restores (raw) and  (cooked)

If you have access to water, fishing is a great way to gather food, and after it is cooked it fills 2.5 units on the hunger bar. After creating a fishing rod, a 4 block deep patch of water will provide an endless supply of food. However, gathering large amounts of fish is slow. If possible, find or create a sheltered and well-lit fishing spot so you can fish overnight or during storms. Fishing can be done indoors (by creating a pool in your shelter), but this is markedly slower. One solution is to build a covered (and gated) bridge or other shelter, from which you can safely fish overnight in outdoor water. Raw fish can also be used to tame and breed ocelots.

Mushroom Stew
Restores 

Fairly hard to get at first but easy to farm food, Mushroom Stew is quite affordable and hunger staving meal. It used to heal 4 units, like Steak; now it heals three units, like chicken. Once you have both types of mushrooms, getting additional ones is relatively easy. Mushroom Farms should be made in order to harvest mushrooms wisely. Mushroom stew is one of the two non-stackable foods (along with cake) so it can take up a fair amount of inventory space. However, you do not need a crafting table to craft mushroom stew, so you can carry a stack of each mushroom type, plus a bowl (3 slots), and make a bowl at a time when needed. (If you only carry one bowl, you can do this even with a full inventory.) Additionally, if you habitually carry a stack of wood with you on your travels, you can create the bowl when needed, cutting your space needs down to just two slots. The rare Mooshroom can also produce stew, by milking them with a bowl.

Melon
Restores 

Melon Seeds are hard to obtain, as they are only obtainable through chests found in Abandoned Mineshafts and through trading with villager farmers (as of snapshot 12w21a), but once you plant them and have a farm going, Melon Slices are a fairly practical food source. Each slice heals 1 unit, and you should get a lot of them through Melon Farming. Each melon can drop 3-7 melon slices.

Milk
Milk is obtained by right clicking on a cow with a bucket. It does not fill your hunger bar but can clear status effects such as poisoning and potion effects.

Poisonous food
Avoid eating these foods unless you have a Golden Apple or have Milk in your inventory or hotbar:

Rotten Flesh
Rotten Flesh is obtained by killing a zombie. They cause food poisoning 80% of the time so they should be eaten only in an emergency. Because the poisoning effect does not stack, you can eat many of them at a time without losing too many hunger points. It can also be eaten with milk to prevent food poisoning. Zombie flesh is best used to feed or breed wolves because they are not affected by food poisoning.

Raw Chicken
Raw Chicken will cause food poisoning 30% of the time, meaning it is usually a good idea to cook it before you eat it.

Spider Eyes and Poisonous Potatoes
Spider eyes and poisonous potatoes cause poisoning which depletes the health bar. It will deal two hearts of damage to you so spider eyes are better used for potions. However, these are good if you have 9 or 9.5 units of hunger, because once you've eaten one, your health will regenerate.

Emergency measures
If your hunger meter is dropping and you have no food in hand, there are a few emergency measures you can take, depending on available resources:
 * 1) If you have both kinds of mushrooms handy and enough wood for bowls, don't forget mushroom soup!
 * 2) If you have a bucket and a cow, milk the cow—the milk will let you fill up on rotten or raw meat, then cure the resulting poison.
 * 3) On surface:  Kill a cow, pig, or chicken.  Do cook the meat if at all possible, but even eating it raw will fend off utter starvation.
 * 4) If you have at least 3 bone meal (craft from one skeleton bone), you can  destroy some Tall Grass near a river or lake, then plant Seeds and use the bone-meal to instantly grow your wheat.
 * 5) If you have string,wood, and water:  Fishing is relatively quick.
 * 6) A last-ditch measure:  If you're close to your bed or spawn point, stuff your inventory and armor into a chest or two... then die.  On hard mode, you can just wait to die of starvation, otherwise good methods are drowning, jumping off cliffs, or dropping gravel/sand on yourself.    You will respawn with full health and hunger bars, and can then reclaim your stuff.