Raw Chicken

Raw Chicken is a food item dropped when chickens are killed. Each piece of raw chicken restores 2 units of the food bar and 1.2 hunger saturation.

As a cooking ingredient
Cooked chicken can be obtained by cooking the raw chicken in an oven with some kind of fuel. A pair of saplings or a plank is recommended for maximum cooking efficiency.

Alternatively, the player can use a flint and steel to set chickens on fire to collect cooked chicken.

Advantages

 * Chickens are relatively easier to find in the world than pigs or cows.
 * Chickens die easier, as they have only 4 units of health, making obtaining raw chicken both time effective, and food/saturation effective.
 * Supply of raw chicken is easier to maintain as chickens also drop eggs which can be hatched into chicks for mass production of raw chicken rather than being dependent on seeds or wheat for breeding.

Disadvantages

 * Raw chicken has a 30% chance of giving the player food poisoning, which is one reason why it's better to cook it first (the other being more food value).

However, food poisoning just barely counteracts one raw chicken's food saturation, and will not even drain half a hunger shank. This makes it a very minor drawback, especially when eating multiple raw chickens at once. Because food poisoning does not stack, and because raw chicken has a very high food saturation value, eating multiple raw chickens at a time will easily restore more hunger than the poison can take away.

Trivia

 * The poisoning effect is most likely based on the real life disease Salmonella, which is notorious for being present in uncooked meats, more commonly raw chicken, raw eggs and fish.