Bread

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

Naturally generated
Bread can be found as a reward in chests in dungeons, in a mineshaft, and in a village.

Bonus chest
Stacks of 2–3 loaves of bread may appear in bonus chests.

Usage
Since the introduction of tall grass, Bread is arguably among the most efficient early sustainable food sources, with mushroom stew, or maybe apples, 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, you may get enough Bone Meal to help make 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. Several piles of bonemeal may be needed to grow a single stalk of wheat, and you need three wheat for each loaf of bread. This makes it less efficient than using bonemeal to grow a mushroom to giant size. However, seeds are more abundant in most areas than mushrooms, making it a mostly accessible food source. (Then too, growing Huge Mushrooms requires special conditions.) Wheat without the help of bonemeal grows slowly and it takes a fairly large cultivated area to support sufficient food.

Nevertheless, once operations are underway, farms can be enlarged and automated to provide a reliable, safe and renewable supply of wheat for food security. Using automated harvesting (based on pistons and/or water), wheat production becomes much less labor-intensive—hoppers can even allow the seeds and wheat to be automatically gathered into chests. Mechanical assistance contributes directly to the effective amount of energy obtained from wheat, since both movement and harvesting decrease your hunger bar.

Bread has more or less been rendered obsolete by carrots, which take the same amount of time to farm but yield 6 times as much hunger (including saturation) for the land and seed used. However, carrots are harder to come by in a new game (and both wheat and wheat seeds have other uses), so bread is still likely to be the first-farmed food for most players.

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)