Food is essential in Minecraft. It’s crucial for survival or you can die out of starvation. But with over 40 different food items in-game, finding the best food items to store in your chest can be challenging.
But don’t worry, because in this blog post, I’ll help you choose the best Minecraft food for your survival world. So without further ado, let’s get into it!
Understanding Hunger System
The way hunger works in Minecraft isn’t as simple as it seems. There are two different bars. The first one is obvious, and that’s the hunger bar. But the other one is a hidden one named saturation bar.
Both are important in our quest to finding out the best food in Minecraft, so here’s the explanation:
- Hunger Bar shows how hungry your player is. The less filled it is, the more hungry your player gets. If your character has only six hunger points (3 meatsticks), then you cannot run anymore. And once it gets to zero, you’ll start losing hearts until you only have a half heart left. So, keep your hunger bar filled as much as possible.
- The saturation bar is hidden from the player but is still an important bar to keep in mind. The saturation bar also has 20 points. It basically is a timer when your character gets hungry. The more saturation points you get, the longer you can run without eating.
Both bars are depleted by you doing any type of energy-demanding activity. These activities include: walking, running, swimming, breaking and placing blocks.
P.S If you want a visual explanation, I highly recommend installing then I highly recommend you install a mod called Appleskin. It’s available for both Forge and Fabric. Also, if you want to see more fabric mods, I highly recommend you check out this blog.
20 Best Food Items In Minecraft
Now that you understand how Minecraft’s hunger system works, let’s talk about the twenty best food items you can get in the game. Each item has its own pros and cons, which I’ll explain.
Steak
Fills Hunger Bar: 8 hunger points (4 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 12.8 saturation points
One of the best foods for starting players must be steak. That’s because it fills a lot of your hunger and saturation bar! Plus, it’s really easy to get, especially when you make a cow farm. So if you’re looking for a great food item, this is it!
Cooked Porkchops
Fills Hunger Bar: 8 hunger points (4 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 12.8 saturation points
The second best meat to get is porkchops! That’s primarily due to the stats, but also because pigs are very common to get. Plus, a pig drops from one to four porkchops. So pork chops are great food for beginning players!
Cooked Mutton
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 9.6 saturation
Another meat we’ll talk about is cooked mutton. It’s not the best meat to eat, as it’s not that filling, but it also isn’t the worst. If you don’t have a fully automatic chicken farm, then you should eat mutton first. This is due to giving you more saturation points than chicken.
Cooked Chicken
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 7.2 saturation points
Chicken is one of the best food in Minecraft for a good reason. While it’s not the best in filling your hunger and saturation bars, the thing that makes it so great is that it can be 100% fully automatic. No need to kill or cook the meat! There are multiple designs of a fully automated chicken farm, but this is my favorite to build for your next base.
Golden Carrot
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 14.4 saturation points
While it’s a pretty expensive food, it’s still fantastic food to eat. It gives you many saturation points. Plus, if you have a gold farm, it’s not that difficult to obtain.
Plus, with golden carrots, you can breed horses! So it’s helpful in multiple ways.
Golden Apples
Fills Hunger Bar: 4 hunger points (2 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 9.6 saturation
Golden Apple is another expensive food item in the game. While it might not fill your gut as much, it does give you some great things! The typical golden apple gives you both regeneration and absorption effects (which provides you with two extra hearts for 2 minutes).
Then there’s an Enchanted Golden Apple (aka the Notch Apple). It’s not craftable, or it will be overpowered. So you’ll have to find it in chests, but it’s incredible once you do. Additionally to both regeneration and absorption effects, you also get resistance and fire resistance effects.
So this food is best to save for brutal boss battles.
Baked Potatoes
Fills Hunger Bar: 5 hunger points (2.5 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 6 saturation points
One of the best Minecraft food has to be baked potatoes. While they don’t give you as many hunger or saturation points as other foods in-game, it’s attainability that makes it a good food source.
Building a potato farm is easy to make, and you’ll get a lot of food for it. You mostly get 3 to 5 potatoes from one plant. So you can cook quite a lot of baked potatoes in one harvest.
Sweet Berries
Fills Hunger Bar: 2 hunger points (1 meatstick)
Fills Saturation Bar: 0.4 saturation points
If you’re just starting out, I highly recommend you to build a berry farm! While they are not as filling as any other food on the list, you can get many berries quickly. You could make a massive berry farm in just a few first nights!
Melon
Fills Hunger Bar: 2 hunger points (1 meatstick)
Fills Saturation Bar: 1.2 saturation points
Another great food to farm would be melons. While one slice doesn’t really fill you up much, it’s relatively easy to get! One whole melon consists of 3-7 slices. Plus, melon is used for brewing a healing potion, so having a melon farm should be a no-brainer.
Honey Bottle
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 1.2 saturation points
One of the most underrated foods in Minecraft is a Honey bottle, it clears your poison effects upon consumption. So if you’re mining in the caves and fight cave spiders, you’ll have a way to remove the poison!
Pumpkin Pie
Fills Hunger Bar: 8 hunger points (4 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 4.8 saturation points
While not giving as many saturation points, it’s still an excellent food to consider. The great thing about this food recipe is that the ingredients are easy to find. Plus, you can almost fully automate the process by building three automatic farms: egg farm, pumpkin farm, and sugar cane farm.
Cake
Fills Hunger Bar: 14 hunger points
Fills Saturation Bar: 2.8 saturation points
Another sweet treat for your player is cake, and it’s pretty great! When you eat an entire cake, you’ll get X14meatsticks filled. That’s the 3rd best food in terms of filling your hunger bar. Plus, the ingredients are easy to get.
But there’s a con; it’s not the best in filling saturation bars! But it’s OK sometimes to treat yourself!
Cooked Salmon
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 9.6 saturation points
Let’s get into the seafood now! The Minecraft best food, in terms of fish, is to eat is salmon. That’s due to filling the most! Plus, these fishes are widespread, so getting it isn’t going to be difficult.
Cooked Cod
Fills Hunger Bar: 5 hunger points (2.5 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 6 saturation points
The other fish that is quite great is cooked cod. While it’s not as filling as salmon, it’s even easier to get, but you’ll have to do a few things. First, you have to find an ocean temple and kill the elder guardians. Then just build a guardian farm, and you’ll start getting a lot of cod.
Bread
Fills Hunger Bar: 5 hunger points (2.5 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 6 saturation points
Bread is another great food item to eat. While it’s not the most filling, it’s still good food to have! That is due to again being easy to obtain. All you have to have is three wheat, and you’re done!
Beetroot Soup
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 7.2 saturation points
Another bowl of food you can eat is beetroot soup. This soup fills your stomach as well as the mushroom stew, but it is way easier to get. All you need to find is some beetroot seeds and build a big farm.
But it has to be big, as one bowl of beetroot soup needs six beetroots.
Suspicious Stew
Fills Hunger Bar: Depends
Fills Saturation Bar: Depends
Speaking of stew, let’s talk about one of the best ones available. Suspicious Stew is a cheap version of potions as each suspicious stew could give you different potion effects, from good ones like regeneration to bad ones like the withering effect.
But the best suspicious stew is with a Dandelion or Blue Orchid. Why? Because it’s the most filling food in the game. The ordinary suspicious stew only gives you 6 hunger points and gives 7.2 saturation. It’s still good, but the blue orchid stew instead gives you 13 hunger points and 21.2 saturation. But there aren’t any potion effects.
Plus, you can make the suspicious stew very attainable if you are in the mid-game or endgame! For this, you’re going to have to do quite a few things:
- Find a trident & mushroom island. First, you’re going to have to get yourself a trident with channelling effect. Then you’ll have to find a very rare biome called the mushroom island. There you’ll find a mushroom cow.
- Wait for a thunderstorm. Now that you found the mushroom cow, you can bring it back to your base and then wait for a thunderstorm.
- Turn your mushroom cow into a brown mushroom cow. Once there’s a thunderstorm, you’ll have to use your trident on the mushroom cow. This way, the cow will get hit by lightning, turning it into a brown mushroom cow. Lastly, just feed it a dandelion or a blue orchid. Now by milking the cow, you’ll always get the saturation suspicious stew.
Rabbit Stew
Fills Hunger Bar: 10 Hunger Bars (5 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 12 saturation points
Already you should see why this stew is such a good food item. It fills both bars by just eating two stews. Also, the ingredients are relatively easy to get. The only complicated thing you need to do is to catch the rabbit.
If it’s that good, then why don’t a lot of players consume it? That’s due to being more filling to just eat the ingredients. The only reason why you would eat this stew is if you’re going on a long adventure and need to finish eating quickly.
Mushroom Stew
Fills Hunger Bar: 6 hunger points (3 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 7.2 saturation points
This is the original Minecraft stew, which is quite a good food item. While it’s not the most filling and more challenging to get the ingredients than beetroot soup, it can be really cheap to get. All you have to do is explore. You’ll have to find a mushroom island and get a mushroom cow to your home. Then just right-click the cow with a bowl, and you’ll get these stews with no ingredients needed.
Chorus Fruit
Fills Hunger Bar: 4 hunger points (2 meatsticks)
Fills Saturation Bar: 2.4 saturation points
You might be thinking that I’m kidding with you, right? How can a food item that fills so little be any good? Well, let me explain.
I 100% think that this food item is one of the best foods in Minecraft! That’s because chorus fruit has something that no other food has, except the golden apples. And that is that you can eat it when the hunger bar is full! Why does this matter? Well, it’s because you can fill up your saturation bar! This will keep your stomach full, and you can do a lot of things before needing to eat again.
Plus, this fruit can be easily farmed, so it’s easier to get than golden apples.
Conclusion
Now you understand how hunger works in Minecraft and what foods to consume. I also hope I changed your mind around chorus fruits.
So what do you think of my list? Should I have included anything else? If so, then comment down below! I’d love to hear your opinions.
