Minecraft wiki entry for Hunger_management, associated text: The efficiency approach requires the player to avoid wasting hunger or saturation. Meaning, never eat any food that would "overfill" the hunger bar, avoiding to waste saturation points by going over the limit (the hunger value after consuming the food). By doing this, one will use every piece of food to its maximum potential. However, one needs to use more time to tend to their hunger bar, and remember the current saturation value. Therefore, this is ill-suited for healing in emergencies, and should probably be done when safe and/or low on foodstuff.