Cookie

The cookie is an edible item introduced in the Beta 1.4 update. Notch had previously mentioned it in a tweet. It requires Cocoa Beans to craft. It was later confirmed that cocoa beans will appear in dungeon chests. A full stack of eight cookies restores a total of four health (the same amount of health as one Cooked Porkchop).

Advantages

 * Eating a cookie will restore half a heart. This is useful if you want to completely fill your health without wasting the healing potential of a more potent food.
 * The ingredients needed to make cookies can be stacked. By carrying a workbench, 64 cocoa beans, and 128 wheat, you'll be able to craft 512 cookies. This translates to 256 hearts from four inventory spaces, which is superior to the 160 hearts possible from carrying a workbench and three stacks of wheat.

Disadvantages

 * A full stack of cookies will take up the same inventory space and heal just as much as a cooked porkchop. However, porkchops are much easier to acquire, and a single porkchop is easier to eat in the heat of battle than eight cookies.
 * Cocoa Beans can only be found in dungeons at the current time, making cookies highly inefficient, on par with apples.
 * Although the ingredients for cookies are a better use of stackable inventory space than the ingredients for bread, they're still not the best. 64 bowls of Mushroom Stew yield 320 hearts of healing. However, Mushroom Stew doesn't stack, so the ingredients (red and brown mushrooms, at least one bowl and a Crafting Table) must be carried separately. Nevertheless, at only four inventory spaces, it is a much more efficient healer than cookies, and since the bowl and workbench are both reusable, it scales up better if you want to devote more than four inventory spaces to your food supply.

Trivia

 * Ransco loves Cookies