Bread

Bread is a food item created by combining three wheat in a row in a crafting grid.

Use
Since the introduction of tall grass, Bread is arguably among the most efficient early sustainable foods sources, with only mushroom stew easier to produce (in certain environments). By building farms out into open water, Wheat production can be started on Day 1 with no other tools than a Wooden Hoe. With a little luck at night, Bone Meal will ensure you have your first loaf before dawn. Bread has the advantage of not requiring a furnace or fuel, although lighting the farm up to the required light level of 9 for constant crop growth will consume some amount of coal or charcoal.

Wheat farming suffers from very low density. A single application of bonemeal produces only a single wheat - several tens of times less efficient than using that bonemeal on a mushroom. Wheat otherwise grows slowly and it takes a fairly large cultivated area to support sufficient food.

Nevertheless, once operations are underway, a very large farm can eventually be built up that provides a constant, reliable, safe and renewable supply of wheat and food security. With the addition of either piston or water-based automated harvesters, wheat production becomes much less labor-intensive. Due to the exhaustion effect of breaking a block, including wheat, as well as moving, mechanical assistance contributes directly to the effective amount of energy obtained from wheat. Being now stackable, safely obtainable and with a healing value of and Food Saturation of 6, bread is superior to all unprocessed foods and an all-around good choice for most situations.

Video
(Note: At around 0:19 in the video, the narrator says that bread restores three hunger points. That is not true, as bread restores two and a half hunger points)

Trivia

 * Bread can be found as a reward in chests in dungeons and in a mineshaft.
 * Bread restores the same amount of hunger as Cooked Fish.