Eat 'em Ups

There are many reliable foods in Minecraft that were considered for a place on this list. Golden carrots provide the highest saturation of any stackable food, and this allows your health bar to remain full for longer periods of time. Steaks have similar stats, but they’re much easier to obtain. You can get a basic cow farm up and running within 15 minutes of starting a new game world, and steaks are virtually free after the initial setup. Golden carrots, in contrast, require a complex gold farm to be truly efficient in bulk. Golden carrots are better used as an endgame food once you have the infrastructure in place, but steaks offer superior hunger restoration with zero hassle. They have a clear advantage when it comes to efficiency and accessibility, and these are important considerations for any meal.

Final Fight takes place in Metro City’s slums, and our heroes venture through grimy back alleys, dilapidated streets, and run-down subway cars. Along the way, they rummage through garbage cans for helpful items, occasionally unearthing roast turkeys that look suspiciously pristine. People are generally wasteful, and I can imagine scenarios where someone would throw away perfectly good food. It seems unlikely that anyone would toss a 20 pound Thanksgiving turkey unless there was something seriously wrong with it. Turkey should not stay at room temperature for more than a couple of hours, and there’s no way of knowing how long the birds had been sitting in the garbage can saunas. You can’t argue with results, and the turkey does in fact restore their health. Nevertheless, I’m betting that the real final fight takes place on the toilet the next day.

I rarely shout out licensed games, and the Turtles were obsessed with pizza before their video games were released. Konami’s beat ’em ups made it gameplay gold, however. Full pies were scattered reliably throughout the games, restoring health to 100% like the senzu beans from Dragon Ball. Players could always look forward to the next slice of salvation after fending off waves of Foot soldiers. When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II hit the NES, it was plastered with Pizza Hut logos and packaged with a coupon for a free Personal Pan pizza! This was peak ’90s gamer fuel, and it was cool for a game to provide players with a real-world meal that mirrored the in-game delicacy. Limited Run’s release of Shredder’s Revenge kept the tradition alive, and included another Pizza Hut coupon to further blur the lines between pixels and pepperoni.

Donkey Kong might be gaming’s most single-minded ape. His entire life revolves around bananas, bananas, and more bananas. He chows them down in cutscenes and animations, but Donkey Kong Bananza switches things up with the introduction of Banandium Gems. DK smashes entire mountains to hoard these shiny banana collectibles. This raises all sorts of questions. Is he merely obsessed with the idea of bananas, or is he actually eating the gems off-screen? His ridiculous banana hoard from Donkey Kong Country suggests that he values collection over consumption, and it almost seems like he’s saving them for the apocalypse. I understand where he’s coming from. I have a backlog of video games that I haven’t yet played, so I can’t criticize Donkey Kong for hoarding bananas that he hasn’t yet eaten.

Introduced in 2044, Nuka-Cola exploded as the world’s best selling soft drink. There were vending machines on every street corner, and the corporation was pumping out a near-limitless supply. Nuka-Cola remained popular even after its parent corporation was destroyed, and it retained its addictive qualities even though most of the supply was warm, flat, and irradiated. The drink was so ubiquitous that Nuka-Cola bottle caps became the de facto currency in most post-War societies. Nuka-Cola branding was everywhere, and the logo was even plastered on prominent military weaponry and power armor suits. The popularity warranted over a dozen flavors and variants, and a partnership with Jones Soda brought several of them to the real world! It can be presumed that the Jones variants aren’t as radioactive as their fictional counterparts.

If you’ve ever played a Castlevania game, you’ve likely noticed that the walls of Dracula’s castle are teeming with hidden pork chops, turkeys, and pot roasts. Refrigerators weren’t around when the castle was built, so storing perishable items must have been a logistical nightmare. Lining the castle walls with meat wasn’t the best solution to this problem, so there may be another explanation. I maintain that Dracula suffers from agoraphobia or another anxiety disorder. He’s clearly afraid to leave his home, and he probably requested that food be hidden throughout his castle so he’d never have to visit the local market. The shut-in theory would also explain why Dracula sits and waits in his tower instead of taking a more proactive stance against the myriad of vampire killers that are trying to vanquish him.

A Boy and His Blob has a simple hook. Your blob pal Blobert can morph into various puzzle-solving tools if you feed him a jellybean. The entire game is basically built around this premise. There are over a dozen flavors in total, and each one has a unique transformation. Eating licorice jellybeans transforms Blobert into a ladder, tangerine jellybeans turns him into a trampoline, and apple jellybeans allow him to become a jack and lift heavy objects. The jellybeans all have punny names that provide insight into what they will do. The ketchup jelly beans allow the blob to “catch up” be teleporting him by your side. Likewise, the punch-flavored jelly beans will create a hole, like a hole punch. The candy-powered shapeshifting gimmick is brilliant. Who needs a toolbox when you’ve got a sugar rush, amirite?

Pac-Man‘s mastermind, Toru Iwatani, wanted a hit game for boys and girls. His genius recon? Lounging in the Namco break room, where he learned ladies post-dinner chatted endlessly about boyfriends… and food. Dating sims weren’t really a thing in 1980, so he decided to make a game about pure, unadulterated eating. The objective in Pac-Man is to eat all the things. Pac-Man chows down on every dot in the maze, and snags bonus fruit whenever he can. Downing a power pellet allows him to turn the tables and eat his ghostly foes! Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde run for cover, and Pac-Man nets 200 points a pop for ingesting the terrified apparitions. Pac-Man’s entire existence revolves around eating, and ghosts are easily the most interesting thing on the menu. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: eating ghosts is batshit insane.

The 21st century ushered in a food-prep frenzy with games like Cooking Mama, Order Up!, and Overcooked. BurgerTime beat them to the grill by decades, hitting arcades in 1982. As chef Peter Pepper, you navigate mazes of ladders and platforms, casually stepping on oversized buns, patties, lettuce, and tomatoes to make them tumble and stack into epic burgers. The entire operation has “health code violation” written all over it, but it’s hard to complain given how cheap burgers were in the ’80s. To his credit, Peter Pepper would fend off rogue ingredients like hot dogs, fried eggs, and pickles that clearly had no business being on a burger. It’s not clear who’s eating the massive burgers, but Peter clearly sticks his neck out for them. I sure hope the pay’s decent.

Arguably the most iconic power-up ever, the Super Mushroom turns Mario into a brick-smashing behemoth. One touch (or nibble), and he doubles in size, doubles his durability, and gains the ability to shatter blocks into oblivion. They’re absurdly common, bursting from question blocks in nearly every level. (These pixel shrooms look downright delectable compared to real mushrooms, which are often grown in literal piles of shit.) While astute observers might argue that Mario doesn’t actually eat the mushrooms, this debate has been settled decades ago. In a 2025 interview, longtime Nintendo producer Takashi Tezuka confirmed that Mario does indeed eat the mushrooms. The Mario & Luigi games had already provided clarity on this issue, and our favorite plumbers clearly toss them into their mouths like candy!