Taking Inventory: Porkchop

Snuffle snuffle... OINK. Minecraft’s pigs are straight-up adorable. Look at their little noses! But within their fleshy bodies, they conceal an item of great deliciousness. Click away, vegetarians - because today we’re featuring the porkchop.

Porkchops have been a part of Minecraft for a very long time - almost a decade! They were added in February 2010, during Minecraft’s “Indev” phase. Originally raw porkchops restored one and a half hearts of health when eaten. Now they restore one and a half points of hunger instead.  BUT! Cook them in a furnace, smoker or campfire, and they become exponentially tastier - restoring a whopping four points of hunger instead.

There are two ways to get hold of raw porkchops - one is by pilfering them from the chest of a butcher villager. The other... well. Let’s just say that there are always more pigs in Minecraft. So try not to feel too guilty. 

As well as cooking porkchops, they can also be fed raw or cooked to wolves for breeding, healing and to speed up wolf puppy growth, or traded raw to butcher villagers for emeralds. Oh, you can also buy cooked porkchops from butchers directly, if the whole “slaughtering a pig” process sounds a bit distasteful.

Pork chops, in the real world, also come from pigs. In fact, pork is one of the most commonly-consumed meats in the world. There are about a billion pigs alive at any one time, and humans have been keeping them since as long as 13,000 years ago. Unfortunately, large-scale intensive pig farming is not so good for the planet (or the pig). 

A chop, if you’re wondering, is a cut of meat from the pig’s loin taken perpendicularly to its spine, often containing a rib - like beef T-bone steak. They tend to be leaner than other cuts of pork, though chops taken from the shoulder end of the pig are much fattier.

In Minecraft, all pork chops are the same - and exactly as delicious as each other. But we don’t blame you if you’d rather let those pigs roam free and munch on mushroom soup, berries, bread, cookies or carrots instead. As long as your hunger bar fills up, right?