Rotten Flesh

Rotten Flesh is a food item dropped by Zombies and Zombie Pigmen. Eating it restores 20% of your hunger meter. However, Rotten Flesh has an 80% chance of causing food poisoning. Food poisoning seems to make your food saturation level decrease faster as well. You can cure your poisoning by using a bucket of Milk.

Rotten Flesh cannot be cooked or used in any crafting recipes.

Rotten flesh heals Wolves without poisoning or causing damage to them. Zombies drop 0-2 pieces of rotten flesh upon death. Zombiepigmen also drop rotten flesh upon death.

Advantages

 * Rotten Flesh is rather easy to get once one has a sword/bow and armor, as zombies are more common than passive mobs.
 * Rotten Flesh can be a good emergency food when other sources are depleted if used in high dosages, restoring more hunger than the poison can take away.
 * Rotten Flesh can be used to feed wolves instead of other foods you can use for your own benefit.

Disadvantages

 * Rotten Flesh has a 80% chance to trigger the "Hunger" potion effect, making hunger fast-forwarded for 30 seconds.
 * Rotten Flesh only restores and cannot be cooked.

Trivia

 * Before Rotten Flesh was added, Zombies dropped Feathers. This was because feathers were added before Chickens, and there was no other way to obtain feathers at that time.
 * In Alpha and Beta, Zombie Pigmen dropped Cooked Porkchops instead of Rotten flesh and Gold Nuggets.
 * There is a certain amount of irony to the fact that zombie flesh is edible, if somewhat toxic, as zombies are typically portrayed as being the ones to feed on human flesh.