Today I’m going to be ranking the best food items in Minecraft. Food is largely used to increase your hunger levels, which allows you to perform actions like running, jumping, and not starving. That being said, not all food is created equal.
To be brief, food gives you hunger, but it also gives you a small effect called saturation. Saturation gives you a hidden buffer of hunger regeneration that is used up before hunger. Our full guide explains the whole thing, but it will be important to know about this food list.
But, in reality, some foods give you more bang for your buck than others. Want to know which is which? Read on!
Table of Contents
10. Apples
Food: 3
Saturation: 3.6
Overall Effectiveness: 6.6
Ah yes, the mighty apples. An apple a day will keep the doctor away, but it will also cause you to starve because an apple a day isn’t very nutritious.
The same rule applies to Minecraft. Apples are great to have and are super good for you, but they also happen to give very little in terms of hunger. A meager three hunger points are pathetic for something that can’t be mass-produced like wheat, and the saturation isn’t much to look at either.
Certainly not a bad food to have around, but one of the worst “healthy” options you have available to you in Minecraft.
9. Carrot
Food: 3
Saturation: 3.6
Overall Effectiveness: 6.6
Slightly above the apple is the humble carrot. Boasting the same exact stats as an apple you might wonder why I rank it higher. The simple answer? You can make as many as you want.
If I wanted to build a plot of carrots the size of the Minecraft map I could. With apples, I’d have to cut down every tree in the world. Therefore, carrots for the win!
8. Melons
Food: 2
Saturation: 1.2
Overall Effectiveness: 3.2 x (3-7)
Melons! One of my favorite foods to use in Minecraft simply because of how easy they are to make and how much food they can give you.
Each melon can drop between 3-7 melon slices. Now, melon slices aren’t very good on their own, giving only 2 food and 1.2 saturation. But having 7 melon slices, now that’s a party.
In terms of efficiency, melons are better than carrots so they rank right above them.
7. Bread
Food: 5
Saturation: 6
Overall Effectiveness: 11
Bread is the de-facto food of the Minecraft community. You’ve made it, I’ve made it, everyone who has ever played Minecraft has at one point use bread as the main source of food. Which is good considering how easy it is to make.
To make bread all you need is a bunch of wheat. Thankfully, the villagers are nice enough to grow it for you. Don’t go killing a whole town of villages for a single thing of bread though…. oh who am I kidding? Go crazy.
6. Mushroom Stew
Food: 6
Saturation: 7.2
Overall Effectiveness: 13.2
Of all the stew you can make in Minecraft, mushroom stew is the best. It’s easy to make and has good stats to boot. If you are ever lucky enough to find the mushroom biome this should be your go-to food source.
Get a set of shears and go tear up those mooshrooms!
5. Cake (Whole)
Food: 14
Saturation: 2.8
Overall Effectiveness: 16.8
Cake is a pain in the butt to make (hey that rhymed!) but it has good stats and can be devoured in pieces, making it slightly more versatile than other food sources.
To craft a cake you will need an egg, some wheat, sugar, and milk. Not terribly difficult to come by, but still a hassle to have to go through.
The saturation stats on the cake, however, are extremely low. 2.9 for the whole thing! Definitely not healthy for you, but god is it delicious.
4. Chicken
Food: 6
Saturation: 7.2
Overall Effectiveness: 13.2
Very few things in the world of Minecraft are as plentiful as chicken. They are there when you spawn and they will be there when you die. But, before that inevitable creeper death, you should be eating a lot of chicken.
You might notice that the hunger stats for chicken are lower than the cakes, yet, chicken ranks higher. Again, this is because cake is harder to come by and the stats are so close it really doesn’t matter much.
3. Mutton
Food: 6
Saturation: 9.6
Overall Effectiveness: 15.6
Mutton is a prime example of why you should understand the reasons behind saturation. Both chicken and mutton fill the hunger bar the exact same amount, but mutton gives you way more saturation and thereby makes it a much better food source.
Also, mutton is dropped by sheep, another extremely plentiful animal in the world of Minecraft.
2. Suspicious Stew
Food: 13
Saturation: 21.2
Overall Effectiveness: 34.2
Suspicious stew has some crazy stats for food consumption. It is the best food for recovering hunger and saturation in Minecraft. Sadly, it is somewhat challenging to come by, requiring mushrooms, a bowl, and a dandelion/blue orchid.
If you have the required resources to make a stew like this, do so. On longer trips where you won’t have access to all of your farms, it will be 10x more efficient to carry a couple of suspicious stews to last you the whole trip.
1. Steak/Porkchop
Food: 8
Saturation: 12.8
Overall Effectiveness: 20.8
Both cooked steak and cooked porkchop give the exact same hunger and saturation, making the choice between the two completely subjective. Got pigs? Eat porkchop. Got cows? Eat steak.
Super easy to make, super easy to come by, making steak and porkchop the best food in all of Minecraft.
