Best Food in Minecraft

The topic of food in Minecraft is gigantic, there a lot of things to discuss and factor, but if you need a quick summary rundown of the topic here’s the juiciest information of all in one table:

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With the summary out of the way, let’s dive into the topic in more detail!

Hunger VS Saturation Explained

Minecraft’s hunger and food mechanuic is surprisingly more complex than you’d expect. The mechanic is more complex due to the 2 mechanics: hunger and saturation. While hunger is pretty self-explanatory and easy to see, saturation on the other hand is a hidden mechanic unknown to many:

• Hunger: This is the value of how much visible drumsticks near you hotbar the food restores.
• Saturation: This is a hidden value that determines for how long your hunger level will stay filled.

So, high saturation food keeps you hunger level filled for a longer period of time, meaning you will need less food to keep going for longer. While some foods fill up a lot of hunger, it might have low saturation and you will end up using more food and it won’t last you for long either. Hence, balancing between the hunger and saturation is the keyh to choose the best food option out there.

Our Ranking Criteria

So, knowing the in’s and out’s, let’s establish criteria based on which we will be evaluating and choosing the best food in the game:

• Hunger restored: How much of the visible bar actually fills up
• Saturation: How long the food keeps you full
• Farming effort: How easy it is to get the food
• Cooking requirement: Whether you need fuel and furnaces to make it good
• Availability: How early in the game you can get it
• Scalability: How easily you can mass-produce it
• Game stage usefulnessWhether it fits early-game sirvival or late-game exploration
• SMP / Server practicallity: How well it works for multiplayer games

The Ultimate Minecraft Food Comparison Table

Now that the mechanics has been revealed and the criteria for ratings established, let’s compare the most popular food options in the game. Take a look at this table:

Best Early-Game Food

When you first spawn into the world and only begin your journey, one of your first priorities is to get decent enough food fast, as you will be adventuring, fighting and running from place to place a lot during the early stages of the game. Out of all the options from the table before, the best early-game foods are:

• Bread: Highly accessible, requires no cooking and close to zero effort to get a good enough amount that would last you for days. Best way to get it — find a village early on in the game and just farm all the hay blocks there. Then you can craft wheat and bread out of those. In case it wasn’t enough, go for another village!
• Baked Potatoes: An incredibly solid option. Requires from effort compared to the bread, as you would need to actually grow and cook it, but in return you get a very good, sustainable food source that will be a great fit until the very latest stages of the game.

PRO TIP

Pro Tip: Get bread as your food source at the very start of the game and aim to head to the nether as early as possible. Your main objective there would get lots of bone blocks in the Soul Sand Valley biome. You can re-craft those blocks into loads of bone meal and get an insane amount of potatoes within 5 to 10 minutes of constantly growing them with bone meal and farming them right away. Once you get those, you’ve secured your food supplies for a long period of time, so you can focus on other tasks at hand.

• Carrots: good option, as it requires no cooking. Although the low hunger fill and saturation stats of the crop does make it a much more weaker option. Best to save a few of those to start your own farm once you find a suitable place for the base, until then baked potatoes and bread are a supreme option.

NOTE

Note: If you get raw meat(beef, pork, chicken) early in the game, save it for later when you can cook it. Raw meat is the last resort option if you found yourself out of food completely, because it restores little to no hunger and saturation and on top of that, with meat like chicken you can even get poisoned.

Best Crop-Based Food

Once you established your place for the base, you can work on creating a crop farm, so you will have a sustainable, basically infinite food source. The best crop-based foods are as follows:

• Potatoes & Carrots: These were briefly mentioned before, but now in the context of establishing your own crop farm, the roles of the foods have been a bit reversed. Potatoes still remain one of the most accessible and rewarding options with a prospect of making baked potatoes, while carrots has climbed the ranking and are not a better option compared to the wheat. Why is that? Simple: easy to grow, may drop multiple carrots from one crop(applies to potatoes as well), future prospects of making the best food in the game — golden carrots.
• Wheat: While bread was an amazing option right at the start of the game, now that we are talking about a farm, it’s a much less appealing option due to single-yield nature of wheat, which makes it less efficient compared to potatoes and carrots. Additionally, you can’t make anything except for bread from the wheat, which is not the worst food, but only a good option at the start. Why only at the start? It’s a balanced trade off, you get a decent enough food with practically zero effort, in a big amount that will last you for long. With farms this doesn’t work, as you pour more effort into growing and get the same “decent enough” food and in a much smaller amounts.
• Golden Carrots: Just as it was mentioned before — simply the best food there is in the game. While it requires additional resources like gold to be made, at it’s core it’s still a crop-based food, which stems from a well made carrot farm. So making a potato farm for now and carrot farm for the future prospects of making golden carrots is very sound plan. Additionally, golden carrot can be brought from maxed out farmer villager. So alternatively to growing carrots and crafting golden carrots out of them, you can make a trading hall with maxed out farmer villagers to constantly trade for golden carrots. Both option have their pros and cons, so the key here is choosing what works best for you: farming or trading.

Best Meat-Based Food

Even though crop-based food is good, it doesn’t provide much saturation(except for golden carrots). So the natural line of progression here would be to make and animal farm. Let’s break down the best meat based food:

• Steak & Cooked Porkchop: An undeniable kings of the meat-based crops, and come in second to the golden carrots as an overall best food in the game. On top of that, creating a farm for these isn’t any more difficult than for the other options in the list, it’s an absolute winner!
• Cooked Chicken: Weaker relatively to the previous, but nonetheless still a great option. Mostly holds its value in a relatively easy automation process.
• Cooked Fish(Salmon / Cod): Great alternative to chicken if you live near the ocean or enjoy fishing, but it’s still much weaker compared to the Steal & Porkchop, so going out of your way to get fish as you main food is unnecessary.

Animal farms require more effort and resources to maintain and gain good food from, however, the saturation of meat-based foods is much higher and is definitely worth the hustle.

Best Late-Game Food

Once you hit the late game phase, with the basic resources gathered, and only the most difficult of challenges to overcome(like The Wither, Ancient City, Ominous Trials etc.) your focus when choosing the food should shift towards maximum efficiency. Maximum efficiency being, the most hunger and saturation filled with a single food item, while requiring as less of effort as possible. With that said, here’s your best options:

• Golden Carrots: Just like it was mentioned before, it’s the best food in the game there is. While it requires more effort compared to the next option on the list, the margin of gain from a single item of food is just that big that is makes the whole hustle very much worth it.
• Steak & Cooked Porkchop: Remain an excellent option, with great hunger and saturation fill stats. Compared to the golden carrots requires way less effort, which might be a better pick for certain players.
• Golden Apple: This, as it was stated in the table above, is a emergency use only food. It refills very little hunger and saturation, but its value comes from the effects the food gives you when you eat it: additional HP, regeneration and absorption buffs. This is a very valuable item to keep to help you get out of dangerous situations. Alternatively, there is an enchanted golden apple. Contrary to the normal golden apple, it cannot be crafted, only found in certain places. Those give you even stronger buffs, so if you have it, this should be the absolute last resort.

Best Food for Exploration, Mining, and the Nether

When leaving for adventures, exploration, mining and the Nether, you top priority when it comes to food is finding a balance between the inventory space and quality / usefulness of the food. So here are some reasonable advice on what would fit best for these specific scenarios:

• Long mining trips require constant sprinting, fighting mobs, ascending / descending caves. On top of that you want to grab as much resources as possible. So, your best option is high saturation, stackable foods, like steak / cooked porkchop or golden carrots.
• Nether trips are dangerous, you will be traveling in dangerous, unpredictable biomes with lots of hostile mobs, exploring dungeons, crossing lava lakes. So, you will need a reliable source of food, that will also help regenerate health quickly / save you from dangerous situations. Best solution is: bring the best food you got, be it golden carrot or baked potato, just the best you got. Every player decides on their own when to go to Nether, so there is no way of telling what is an accessible food in your specific situation, hence bring the best you got is generally the best way. Additionally don’t forget at least a few golden apple and a fire resistance potions. This way you will secure yourself a better chances of getting out of the Nether victorious.
• Exploration, best food for that would high saturation, stackable and that doesn’t require much preparations, so you won’t have any reason to stop and lose time waiting. So, the best food for exploration is quite similar to mining actually.

Best Food for Boss Fights and Dangerous Content

Whether you are fighting an Ender Dragon, undergoing Ominous Trial or exploring Ancient City, you will need a top tier food, as this is the most dangerous and difficult activities in the game. By top tier food, we mean:

• High Saturation Food: This is a mandatory requirement to insure your health regenerate rapidly after taking damage and that you will always be able to sprint when the time comes.
• Stackable & Big Amounts: Doing these activities usually takes a lot of time, add that up to the dangerous nature of the activities and you will easily land on the conclusion that you will not only need a top tier food, but a lot of it as well. So bring along something stackable and at least 2 stacks of it.
• Emergency food: Golden apple, better yet an enchanted golden apple is a must for dangerous content. Same thing as with normal food — bring at least a few, just to be safe.

Best Food for SMP and Servers

Playing on an SMP server, or just together with your friends changes how you manage food. Multiplayer servers thrive on shared resources:

• Shared Farms: Massive potato and carrot fields are easy for early stages of the game, easy to maintain and give the server a cool, natural survival look.
• Cow / Pig Farms: Scalable animal farms, better yet automated ones, can provide food for the whole server if everyone pitches in for its construction and maintenance.
• Villagers: On top of the usual farming, if your server has a trading hall, be sure to have at least a few farmer villagers, as they can sell golden carrots for some emeralds once maxed out. This is usually a very good deal for a server, as gathering resources is much easier together.

Note on Cooking and Smokers

As you know already, lots of food has a cooked variation, which is usually way better than the raw one. However, even though this block came out in version 1.14 alongside the “Village & Pillage Update”, many players don’t really use it — we are talking about smoker. Block used to make a Butcher villager, but also, used to cook food twice as fast as the normal furnace, saving you both time and fuel. You can see the difference in the cooking speed in the gif below. On top of that, you can check out a more detailed smoker overview via this link.

Overrated and Situational Foods

Minecraft has a big variety of foods, however not every single one of them worth your time and effort, that’s the main reason why we made a table with the best food options in the game. But to be completely sure you won’t waste your time, here’s a quick list of overrated / situational foods:

• Cake: Great for decoration, and generally a fun and useful food when organizing some online party. However, due to the way you have to eat it, it’s probably the worst food you can carry around with yourself.
• Cookies: Fun item to get, but have hardly any value as an actual food.
• Raw Foods: Just like mentioned before, raw food has a very low value to it.
• Mushroom / Suspicious Stew: Great buffs, but stews do not stack in inventory to this day, so they are terrible for long trips / very situational.
• Rotten Flesh / Spider Eyes: Hardly food at all, more of a consumable item. Only eat if you are starving to death, otherwise do you best to find anything, because literally anything would be better.

Common Food Mistakes to Avoid

Here are some common mistakes when it comes to the topic of food in Minecraft:

• Choosing only by hunger points and ignoring the hidden saturation value.
• Relying on raw foods instead of investing some time and cooking it.
• Forgetting to upgrade your food alongside your general progression in the game. You can eat the same food throughout all the game, but as you know from this article, what works well in the beginning might not be a good option later down the line.
• Not preparing proper food for specific situations like mining, exploring and boss fights. These require the best you got to increase your chances of success, so do not neglect it.
• Wasting golden apples / enchanted golden apple on a simple snack. It’s highly valuable food, designed specifically to keep you alive during dangerous moments, so don’t just waste it to simply refill hunger.