Top 5 food items in Minecraft as of 1.16.4

Highlighting the best food items in Minecraft (Image via ibxtoycat, YouTube)
Highlighting the best food items in Minecraft (Image via ibxtoycat, YouTube)

Food is essential in Minecraft survival, mainly when the game mode difficulty is set at anything above peaceful.

At easy, normal, hard, and hardcore difficulty settings, players will lose hunger points and must consume food to restore them. Most Minecrafters are aware of this basic concept.

However, while playing the game, it helps to know exactly what the best food is to consume while factoring things such as saturation and applied status effects into the mix.

Note: This list reflects the writer's personal opinion and is only a guide to give players an idea of great foods in Minecraft.


The best five foods to eat in Minecraft survival

#5 - Bread

Bread is a highly reliable Minecraft foodstuff
Bread is a highly reliable Minecraft foodstuff

While bread isn't the most exotic and dominant food in terms of raw stats to exist within the blocky universe of Minecraft, it remains a staple food due to its extremely reliable nature, which is why it is on this list.

Wheat is the only ingredient needed to craft bread, and a large wheat farm is extremely easy for players to create. A wheat farm only really requires a few seeds to start-up, which players can effortlessly obtain from destroying grass.

Once crafted, bread will restore five hunger points and six saturation points. Again, there is better food in terms of raw stats in the game, but bread is a brilliant trade-off due to its sheer ease to obtain.


#4 - Steak

Steak restores the most hunger points in Minecraft
Steak restores the most hunger points in Minecraft

Gamers can obtain steak by cooking a piece of raw beef or setting a cow on fire and killing it.

In terms of stats, steak is the best in the game, restoring a massive eight hunger points and 12.8 saturation points. The only reasonable drawback of consuming steak regularly is that it's somewhat expensive to craft without a reliable cow farm in place.


#3 - Suspicious stew

Suspicious stew can be milked from brown mooshrooms
Suspicious stew can be milked from brown mooshrooms

Suspicious stew is an incredibly unique foodstuff within Minecraft, with several quirks. The stew can only be obtained by crafting, trading with an expert-level farmer villager, milking brown mooshrooms, or finding it in a shipwreck.

Suspicious stew cannot be obtained from a creative inventory if the player uses the "/give" command to get the stew. It will simply do nothing when eaten.

Suspicious stew refills six hunger points and 7.2 saturation points, but what makes it especially great is that it can also be used to give players a powerful status effect of their choice, such as regeneration. The effect the stew bestows on players depends on what flower was used to craft it.


#2 - Golden carrot

Golden carrots have the best saturation in the game
Golden carrots have the best saturation in the game

Golden carrots are favored by many expert Minecrafters where there are no resource constraints, such as in some types of Minecraft servers where they can be commonly found in kits.

The flashy golden carrot is pretty expensive for a regular survival player to craft, requiring eight gold nuggets and a carrot to make.

Specifically, what makes the golden carrot so great is that it restores a whopping 14.4 saturation points, which is the most in the game by a considerable margin.


#1 - Enchanted golden apple

Enchanted golden apples are some of the most OP items in Minecraft
Enchanted golden apples are some of the most OP items in Minecraft

Although much less expensive than in previous versions of Minecraft, enchanted golden apples will still be a rare luxury for many players.

Enchanted golden apples can only be found in chests across the Minecraft world. They are extremely useful in PvP situations, specifically against other players on Minecraft PvP servers. When consumed, they give eight hearts of absorption protection to players, fire resistance 1, resistance 1, and regeneration 2.

Enchanted golden apples can also be fed to horses to improve their taming chances. Furthermore, they speed up the growth phase of baby horses by four minutes.

Also read: The top 5 best Minecraft Skyblock servers to play