Bread

Bread is a food item available in Indev, Infdev and Alpha. It can be crafted by putting three Wheat in a horizontal line. Bread restores 2.5 Hearts, but it takes a somewhat lengthy process to make (See Farming).

Disadvantages

 * The process of creating bread is lengthy. Briefly, in order to create bread, a player needs to: craft a hoe, obtain seeds, create suitable farmland, plant the seeds, wait for at least 1 day for wheat to mature, harvest the wheat, and finally create 1 bread from 3 pieces of wheat. This is a relatively lengthy process, as compared to, for example, killing pigs. For more, see Farming.
 * Each piece of bread only heals 2.5 hearts, compared to, for example, cooked ham which heals 4 hearts. For more, see Food.

Advantages
A player may, for example, leave a field of crops to grow for 2-3 days while mining underground, return briefly for a harvest and to plant more seeds. This ensures a reliable source of food and allows for relatively uninterrupted mining.
 * Wheat farming is reliable. Pigs and mushrooms are spawned randomly. Though both are relatively plentiful, it is more reliable to obtain food from a field of crops than to hunt after randomly generated mobs.
 * Bread heals 2.5/10 hearts. This means that less of it is potentially wasted, as compared to items that heal more.
 * A player can also carry a stack of 63 wheat and a workbench into the mines with them and craft as much bread as they need, for a total of 52.5 hearts, whereas pork cannot be stacked and thus takes up far more space in the inventory for the same healing potential.

Trivia

 * Bread once required 6 wheat (arranged in a 2x3 rectangle) to be crafted.
 * Bread was once stackable to 64 loaves per square.