Food in Minecraft: Dubious Nutritional Value

There are four other foods in Minecraft that I haven’t mentioned yet- and this is because each is special in its own way.

Perhaps the most special is the spider eye- and for all the wrong reasons.  Spider eyes are usually used in alchemy, should you reach the point of doing so.  They are dropped only singly by spiders when you kill them, making them relatively difficult to get and rare.  They are also a terrible food- a spider eye refills a single meatstick, won’t keep you full as long as bread- and will poison you, no question about it.  So, while you can eat them, you’ve really got to be scraping the bottom of the barrel before they can be considered a viable option.

The second worst is, of course, rotten flesh.  Found in (or on) zombies and zombie pigmen, rotten flesh refills two meat-sticks on your hunger bar, and stands a solid 80% chance of poisoning you.  Worse yet, they are even less filling than the spider eye- the only thing that does a worse job of keepingyou full after you eat it is the cookie, which is less poisonous.  Rotten flesh serves almost no purpose in the game- the only really good trait it has is that you can feed it to dogs without poisoning them.

Mushroom stew is another of the more special foods.  A bit difficult to come by, mushroom stew has the unusual quality of being a held food that can only exist singly- you cannot stack mushroom stew.  What’s more, each bowl of mushroom stew requires that you use a wooden bowl to make it.  Thankfully, you are left with an empty bowl afterwards and do not have to replace the bowl.  Because of the way that it fails to stack, the best way to use mushroom stew is to carry its ingredients around in stacks and make it as you need it.  Fortunately, mushroom stew can be crafted without a crafting table, so it isn’t too prohibitive.  Mushroom stew is almost as good as cooked beef or pork- while it doesn’t keep you full as long, it refills four meatsticks, just like the two better foods.

The fourth special food is one that you are unlikely to have in most circumstances- the golden apple.  While a golden apple can be made from an apple and gold (no, I’m not going to tell you how), gold is a rare enough resource in the game that you are probably not going to find yourself walking around with stacks of golden apples- but that’s not too much of a setback.  This is because the golden apple is more than just food.  While it does refill two meatsticks, just like a regular apple, it keeps you full just as long as mushroom stew does.  More importantly, a golden apple causes you to regenerate your health for a short time, in addition to being a food- and this regeneration is actual regeneration, being faster than the healing you get for being full or nearly full, and stacking on top of that.  Because of this, a golden apple is a lot more comparable to a potion for use during quick breaks in a battle than it is to the other forms of food.