Cookie

The cookie is an edible item that requires Cocoa Beans to craft, which appear in dungeon chests, or on Jungle trees off of Cocoa Plants(as of 12w19a). A full stack of eight cookies restores a total of eight Hunger points (the same amount of hunger points as two Cooked Porkchops).

Advantages

 * Cookies are made in stacks of 8 from just a single cocoa bean and two wheat.
 * Since cookies are made in large stacks (64 per in the latest snapshot), they can be used to quickly fill hunger points.
 * Cookies (since 12w19a) recover 1 hunger point. Before that build they only used to restore half a hunger point, the lowest in the game at the time.
 * Cookies can be eaten as soon as the player falls below 9 hunger points without any waste, meaning the player can constantly stay at a high enough hunger level to restore health.
 * Cocoa beans are easy to acquire(12w22a) hanging on jungle trees, making them much cheaper and worth the effort to get them

Disadvantages

 * A single cocoa produces enough cookies to restore the hunger meter as much as two cooked porkchops or steaks. However, porkchops/steaks are much easier to acquire, and a single one is easier to eat than eight cookies.
 * A full stack of cookies heals a total of 64 hunger points, where as a full stack of cooked porkchops/steaks heals 256 hunger points. For comparison, you'd need 512 cookies (8 full stacks of 64) to heal 512 hunger points. Prior to 1.8 version, this would only be portable if you carried a Crafting Table, one stack of cocoa beans, and two stacks of wheat.
 * Cookies have a quite low saturation level compared to cooked porkchops/steaks.
 * Mushroom Stew is a much more efficient hunger point resource than cookies, and since the bowl is reusable, it scales up better if you want to devote more than four inventory spaces to your food supply.
 * Melons have a similar food restoration and saturation level, but can be farmed automatically using a BUD switch.

History

 * The cookie was introduced in the Beta 1.4 update. Notch had previously mentioned it in a tweet. It was later confirmed that cocoa beans would appear in dungeon chests.
 * When cookies were first introduced, they had the distinct advantage of being the only food that could be stacked in its ready-to-eat form. They were given a limit of eight per stack to keep them from becoming too overpowered, since at the time, food worked by healing damage instantly. When hunger was introduced in Beta 1.8, eating became more time-consuming, and food-related health regeneration was capped at a rate of half a heart every four seconds; that is, unless set to peaceful difficulty.
 * Since 12w18a cookies are fully renewable.
 * In weekly snapshot 12w21a, The Player can now purchase cookies with emeralds.