In this blog I write about what is the best food for you at every situation in the game and what is the best way to get it.

Let's start from getting the first food at the start of the game.
When you just started the game you still have not any kind of food, this is a problem for those who play in hard difficulty because their hunger bar goes down pretty fast. So what is the first food you should get? It depends on where did you spawn and what do you have around you.

If you started in a forest or a jungle you will usually have animals around you, than the best food for you is meet.
What kind of meet is better? The meet that gives you the most satiety points is porkchop (dropped by pigs) and beef (dropped by cows). Every porkchop or beef will restore 3 satiety points, if you will cook it (which is very easy because you have wood for crafting table and fuel, and you can easily get some stone by digging down.) you will restore 8 satiety points which is more than twice better. The difference between porkchop and beef is that cows drop more meet and they also drop leather which is very useful. consider leaving some animals alive for breeding them later. If you have no cows and pigs nearby try to find chickens. (raw chicken restores 2 satiety points, cooked chicken restores 6) If there are no chickens too you can start from chopping down the trees around, while getting the wood - and if you want, building a house - the leaves will disappear and drop saplings and apples. Every apple restores 2 satiety points.

If you started in a plains biome you can eat meet too, or if there are no animals around - break some tall grass and get seeds for rising wheat. You can craft bread from the wheat, bread restores 5 satiety points. (you can rise wheat in a forest too but usually you will have better options)

If you start in a desert there is nothing you can get except for monster drops like rotten flesh and spider eyes. rarely zombies will drop carrot or potato. The best thing to do when you start in a desert is to go to explore because you will not find any food there except for monster drops and maybe very few apples in a generated structure.

You will have the same problem in ocean if you spawn on a little island. You might have some tall grass so you have chance to get seeds and rise up wheat, but ocean is not a good place to start from. The best thing to do is to leave and search for a big land, if you have a tree on the island make a boat because the ocean might be very big. If you started the trip to the big land late and the sun goes down when you are still in the ocean just keep moving until you see a big land but don't come too close to it if you know you have a big chance to be killed by the monsters. The monsters will not spawn on the water so you can stay there safe until the morning. If you want to stay in the ocean you must have wood, if you have no wood you have no choice - you must leave and find other place. If you do have wood the first thing you must do is to chop down the tree, collect the saplings and plant them, and make pickaxe. Then you can eat apples and hide under the ground at night, most of the time you will be mining so if you find a mine-shaft search for chests - there is a big chance that a chest will contain melon seeds.

That's all about the start of the game, now let's move on to the best for you after you are stable and have no problems staying alive with the food you have.
After you have house, some food, tools and armor you can start exploring the area around and look for NPC villages. Almost every village contains carrot and potato farms - there you can collect a lot of carrots and potatoes. The better food is potato, it fills only one satiety point but baked potato fills 6 - which is better than carrot that fills 4. You can save the carrots for potions and eat some potatoes if you need, build a potato farm near your house, and after planting the potatoes bake the extra potatoes you have.

If you are familiar with redstone or know how to copy redstone designs from tutorials you might want to make an automatic cooked chicken farm, there is a very compact and simple chicken farm design by Wool Tec MC. (This design works in 1.5.2 but no in the last snapshots - I tested it in 13w26a and it did not work, maybe I will make a design that works in the new snapshots and upload it for you)

The last thing is the farming, how to farm every food and what are the advantages and disadvantages of every farm.

The most compact way of farming wheat, potatoes and carrots is to find an area of 9x9 block, replacing the middle block with water, making farmland (using hoe) from the other blocks in the 9x9 area and planting there. You can also harvest the plants fast using water. (using dispensers with water bucket or placing water by yourself)
The disadvantage of farming wheat is that you have twice more items, you get seeds. You have absolutely nothing to do with the extra seeds because you always get more from the farm and there are no seeds missing. Another problem is that you need 3 times more wheat to make one food item - that fills 5 satiety points, compare this with one ready baked food item that fills 6. This means for 3 farmed items you get from wheat farm you get one item food that heals 5, and for 3 potatoes you baked you can fill 18, almost four times more efficient!

If you are farming some kind of meet just make a fence, make the animals go after you by holding the food they eat - they will follow you. After you have animals in the fence you can them and they will breed. Every time you go near the fence feed them so they will breed more, when you need more food FIRST feed them and only then kill some, so the ones you kill will breed too. Don't forget to cook the meet.

Please comment if you have any questions or if I missed anything, and please let me know if I helped you!

For more information about food take a look at Minecraft Wiki http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Food