No matter how you slice it (heh), food is vital to playing Minecraft.
Your hunger meter can be your worst enemy if you have no food; on easier difficulties, if you don’t keep it at least partially full, you will gradually take starving damage until you have only one hit point- half of a heart- left to live on. This will make you easy prey for any and everything damaging. On harder difficulties, you can starve all the way to death (which may or may not be worse, depending, since you can at least partly control where you die and leave all your stuff).
Your hunger meter can, however, be reduced to a minor bit of upkeep. If you have and eat enough food to keep your hunger bar from having two entirely empty meat-sticks (or more emptiness than that), you will gradually regenerate health. This can save you many times over if you have a tendency to fall and hurt yourself or take injury frequently from dealing with the many monsters and other hazards you can encounter in Minecraft. If you keep your hunger meter half full or more, you will have the ability to run- double-tapping a direction and holding the second press to move quickly and leap much further than you can while walking normally.
Because of this, food- and obtaining it- is a very important part of playing the game and making continual progress, whether that’s towards completing the achievements and finishing up in The End, or towards becoming an accomplished builder and constructing grand and intricate structures.
Food comes in three main forms: Things you gather, things you grow, and things you make.
Food also has two aspects- how much it fills you, and how long you stay full.
Depending on what you have eaten, you will find that your hunger bar empties more quickly or more slowly- so you need to pay attention to what you’re eating, and how quickly you wind up eating it to keep up your activity without starving (or starving to death). Curiously, how long a food keeps you full seems to have been partly related to how easy the food is to get- but only partly.
The foods that are least filling- that fill the smallest part of your hunger bar and keep you full the shortest time- are generally the easiest to get, but the remainder of the foods vary with no apparent regard to the difficulty of creating them. I am not sure why this is, but it is this way, and you will find yourself having to deal with it at some point when you run out of one food and have to change to another.
That said, let’s talk about the foods.
