Food

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Food is a vital resource within New Horizons compared to vanilla, as a few limitations introduced by mods like Nutrition, HungerOverhaul, and Spice of Life will prevent you from being easily able to mass produce food as soon as you can plant seeds. After completing the quest 'Hunger No More' in the 'Fishing, Farming, Cooking' section of the Quest Book, the player acquires a healing axe, significantly minimizing the need for food from then on, Though, if they want some of the positive status effects, they will need to keep their nutrients balanced still.

Limitations for sourcing food

Seeds can no longer be acquired by breaking grass.
After eating a food item four times, you will receive diminishing returns from eating it, up until losing hunger while eating it, until you cycle through 20 food items eaten.

Most food items that give you more than a shanks worth require Pam's Harvestcraft tools or other items to complete the recipes.
Animals killed without using a knife have a chance to explode, which can cause damage, thus meaning you will need more food to heal.

While not impossible to overcome, these limitations can cause a significant headache for players in the early game.

Effects of Food

There are also various effects regarding food within New Horzions, both good and bad. The bad effects are acquired mainly via HungerOverhaul, and the good from Nutrition and Spice of Life.

Effects of being hungry

With five full shanks (ten hunger) left, you will get a "Hungry" status, but this doesn't seemingly have any actual negative effects.
With three full shanks (six hunger) left, "Hungry" will be replaced by "Starving", but there are still no detrimental effects besides the vanilla being unable to sprint at three shanks.
With two full shanks (four hunger) left, you will be given a Slowness and Mining Fatigue effect, which are infinite and can not be removed via means such as drinking milk.
At one and a half shanks (three hunger), Slowness and Mining Fatigue are set to their second level of potion effect.
At one shank (two hunger), Slowness and Mining Fatigue are set to their third level, and Weakness is now also applied.

At half a shank (one hunger), Slowness and Mining Fatigue are set to the fourth level, Weakness is set to its second level, and Nausea is also now applied.

These negative effects are most of the time just inconveniences, but getting less than three shanks of hunger while out mining or exploring can lead to a very painstakingly slow walk back home.

Effects of being fed

As soon as you eat any food item, you gain a 'Well-Fed' effect for which the length depends on the food item you ate. This status provides a small health regeneration effect for its duration. Depending on how much food you need to eat, and the quality of the food you have, this effect can stack for an extended period.

As you eat more unique foods, you will gain bonus hearts, increasing your total health capacity.You need to eat 50 half-shanks of unique food to acquire the next bonus heart. All of the info you need for this can found in the Food Journal or be done by using the command, /foodlist size. This will list how many total half-shanks you've eaten, how many bonus hearts you have, and how many half-shanks until the next.

These two bonuses may not seem like a whole lot for positive effects, but that is as most of the bonus positive effects come from the Nutrition mod's nutrition system. However, bonus hearts are extremely valuable in acquiring as they increase your total max health, allowing you to last longer in combat, and the Well-Fed serves as a nice little regeneration effect that is also valuable as it does not consume any saturation to regenerate HP.

Effects based on diet

There are two negative status effects that poor nutrition can give the player.

Mining Fatigue, which is given when the players' average nutrition for all bars is less than 20%.
Weakness, which is given when the players' average nutrition for all bars drops to lower than 10%.

These effects are extremely difficult to acquire accidentally, as even a diet consisting mostly of one food type, would still give you an average of 20%, as 100% of one type would be divided among the five nutrient types.

There are four positive status effects that a properly balanced diet can give the player

Toughness is given when any nutrition bar is above 90%, and for each bar that is, an additional level of toughness is given.
Strength is given when the average nutrition of the player is above 70%.
Resistance is applied once the average nutrition is greater than 80%
Haste is applied when average nutrition is greater than 90%.

Unlike the negative effects, you are more than likely to get some of these positive effects without even trying, as by the time you can grow your own food, have Pam's Harvestcraft tools, and also just from some of the Quest Book rewards, you can more than likely reasonably get a level or two of toughness, and strength without even making it an implicit goal.

Early Food

In the early game, adequate food can prove extremely challenging to acquire. Primary methods of gathering food during the early game are mostly going to involve breaking Pam's Harvestcraft gardens, fruit trees, berry bushes, loot chests from mods like Roguelike Dungeons, and villages (if you find one early). Killing animals is also an option, but the distance needed to travel to find animals as more and more are killed near home will make it unavailable quickly. You will be able to acquire two apple trees using the two apples as a reward from 'Crafting Time'. This is the focus of the quest 'Oak Trees are not Apple Trees', as it has you make an apple sapling to complete the quest. Upon completing that quest, you also get a choice reward between a Pear, Cherry, Orange, or Walnut sapling. The distinction of which one to pick is not too important, but if you are already near one type of tree, you should probably not pick that tree.

During 'And So, It Begins' in the Quest Book, you will be told how to get wheat seeds by tilling grass away from water (the quest itself isn't for the seeds, but the book directly informs you of this change for getting seeds), and given five carrots in exchange for eight sticks from the quest 'You Reap...'. The quest tells you to plant them, and it is highly optimal to do so, as the immediate next quest requires ten carrots, which will then give you five potatoes that should also be planted. Once you have potatoes growing and have a furnace, you can make one of the first crafted food items, the Roasted Potato on a Stick. Completing the relevant quest for it is a good idea as well, as you can pick two watermelon slices or two pumpkins as a choice reward, which is another crop you can start growing to further increase food options. One should also go out and find blueberries and raspberries, as well as their bushes for the 'Collecting Some Berries' quest, to get Maloberry and Blackberry bushes to further increase food output.

Upon crafting a soft mallet, you can go out to collect snow and combine the hammer, berry of choice, and snowball in the crafting table to make smoothies, these are another easy-to-craft shank and half food item and are especially valuable if you live close to snow. You can also use the mallet to make juices out of fruits and For the quest 'Berry Medley', one can also craft a knife and make bowls, and then with the four berries, combine them in the crafting table to get Berry Medley's, yet another shank and a half food item.

Once you have some iron and assuming you gathered wheat seeds and planted them, using a mortar and pestle, you can grind up the wheat to get flour. Then, using a cauldron filled with water, toss the entire stack of flour into it, and the stack will become dough. With this dough, tons of crafting recipes open up to be available, and since you also have iron, you can begin to make Pam's Harvestcraft tools. This is a major milestone in food production, as from here on, you have access to plenty more recipes with the tools, the dough allows you to make several types of breads, and is required for dozens of recipes. The Harvestcraft tools also open up a bunch more recipes, allowing for a much greater variety in diet, with higher hunger-restoring items. Also, if one can acquire even just a singular book early from villages or Roguelike Dungeons, you can smelt it to get the Cooking for Blockheads I book, which will show you all the recipes you can craft with items in your inventory.

After this point, food begins to be more hunger-restoring (as long as you keep making better food items and not just eating raw crops), but there are still improvements and other crops to examine. Things such as IC2 crops allow things such as meat to be grown from a crop instead of having to manage an animal farm by hand, and the ability to automate processes.