You're going to need to eat, even if healthy, or bad things happen.
I view hunger as a opportunity to address one problem with the game's food: how redundant some food items are. Why make bread when you can eat mushroom stew? Why fish or hunt if you have a big farm? Certain food items are just not as efficient as others.
Here's an idea for how to make collecting a variety of food important.
Over time it declines. When it's empty you'd start to lose health instead. To avoid losing health, and replenish those food icons, just eat food. Simple enough.
My suggestion:
When you eat food you replenish those food icons, but the icons regained are of the food you just ate. So if you eat bread your hunger bar gains bread icons. If you eat fish, your hunger bar gains fish icon. If you eat cake, your hunger bar gets a cake icon etc. What's in your hunger bar represents what's in your stomach at the moment.
You could have many different types of eaten food in your hunger bar at once, arranged in the order you ate them. Although the hunger bar would drain from right to left, newly eaten food would appear on the left side and bump your icons to the right. Basically, the food you ate longest ago is the first to be drained away by hunger. For example in "Bread Bread Fish Bread Cake Pork Fish Mushrooms Pork", the bread on the left would be the most recent thing eaten. The pork on the right would be the first to be drained by hunger.
There would be a good reason to keep track of your recent diet. Food already on your hunger bar would restore less of your hunger bar when eaten. The more times it appears on your hunger bar the less effective it is. For example, if you have no bread on your hunger bar eaten a loaf might restore 2.5 hunger. Until that loaf is digested, a second loaf might only restore 1.5 hunger. A third loaf might only restore 0.5 hunger. A fourth loaf might restore no hunger at all.
It would be important to collect a variety of foods in order to fully fill up your hunger bar. Now this isn't essential. You don't need a full hunger bar to survive. But it means you'll have to eat more often. By eating several different foods you can buy yourself a very long time before your hunger bar runs out. If you just eat one thing you'll require several meals a day.
Note that this suggestion doesn't apply to health hearts: all food items would still heal you the same amount of hearts regardless of how much of it you've eaten. Dietary variety would just be necessary to delay starvation for longer. By changing up what you eat, each item of food would be able to restore more of your hunger bar.
If the food does become less effective when it's in your hunger bar, I think that it should only decrease by .5 units each time
It depends whether Notch grants the same hunger-restoration to all items, or has them restore varying amounts of hunger. In that case it might be that certains foods are more effective than others. For example, perhaps pork would only become .5 less effective each time while bread would lose 1.
It's also appealing though to have all items of food just restore the same amount of hunger though, just so we don't need to keep track of a second set of food stats. I have no opinion whether it's better to start high and drain fast, or start low and drain slow, or vary it for each food.
Even in that simpler case you'd need to strike a balance between how quickly it becomes less effective and how much it initially restores. For example, it's easier to have an item that restores 4 hunger and loses 1 hunger with each use, than an item that restores 2 hunger and loses .5 each time.
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that notch is making it so food doesn't immediately heal you. So I actually thought that once your food meter was filled it would slowly make you start regaining health and the hunger bar would go down as well obviously.
A game that forces you to eat just to be more realistic would just be an annoying pain in the neck.
I'll have to agree with VinylRhapsody that it would be pain in the neck. Also wouldn't it be hard for a new player to eat anything else but pork for a couple days, due to you need iron to make a farm and I think you would want to make a bow before you make a fishing rod (but thats just my opinion). (Edit, forgot about the mushrooms) Also its rare to find mushrooms without going to the Nether, or just for me it is.
You're going to need to eat, even if healthy, or bad things happen.
I view hunger as a opportunity to address one problem with the game's food: how redundant some food items are. Why make bread when you can eat mushroom stew? Why fish or hunt if you have a big farm? Certain food items are just not as efficient as others.
Here's an idea for how to make collecting a variety of food important.
The Hunger Bar
Here's what seems likely as Notch's current plan:
The hunger bar would be represented by a line of food icons (in this photo it's meat):
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/File:Hunger.png
Over time it declines. When it's empty you'd start to lose health instead. To avoid losing health, and replenish those food icons, just eat food. Simple enough.
My suggestion:
When you eat food you replenish those food icons, but the icons regained are of the food you just ate. So if you eat bread your hunger bar gains bread icons. If you eat fish, your hunger bar gains fish icon. If you eat cake, your hunger bar gets a cake icon etc. What's in your hunger bar represents what's in your stomach at the moment.
You could have many different types of eaten food in your hunger bar at once, arranged in the order you ate them. Although the hunger bar would drain from right to left, newly eaten food would appear on the left side and bump your icons to the right. Basically, the food you ate longest ago is the first to be drained away by hunger. For example in "Bread Bread Fish Bread Cake Pork Fish Mushrooms Pork", the bread on the left would be the most recent thing eaten. The pork on the right would be the first to be drained by hunger.
There would be a good reason to keep track of your recent diet. Food already on your hunger bar would restore less of your hunger bar when eaten. The more times it appears on your hunger bar the less effective it is. For example, if you have no bread on your hunger bar eaten a loaf might restore 2.5 hunger. Until that loaf is digested, a second loaf might only restore 1.5 hunger. A third loaf might only restore 0.5 hunger. A fourth loaf might restore no hunger at all.
It would be important to collect a variety of foods in order to fully fill up your hunger bar. Now this isn't essential. You don't need a full hunger bar to survive. But it means you'll have to eat more often. By eating several different foods you can buy yourself a very long time before your hunger bar runs out. If you just eat one thing you'll require several meals a day.
Note that this suggestion doesn't apply to health hearts: all food items would still heal you the same amount of hearts regardless of how much of it you've eaten. Dietary variety would just be necessary to delay starvation for longer. By changing up what you eat, each item of food would be able to restore more of your hunger bar.
It depends whether Notch grants the same hunger-restoration to all items, or has them restore varying amounts of hunger. In that case it might be that certains foods are more effective than others. For example, perhaps pork would only become .5 less effective each time while bread would lose 1.
It's also appealing though to have all items of food just restore the same amount of hunger though, just so we don't need to keep track of a second set of food stats. I have no opinion whether it's better to start high and drain fast, or start low and drain slow, or vary it for each food.
Even in that simpler case you'd need to strike a balance between how quickly it becomes less effective and how much it initially restores. For example, it's easier to have an item that restores 4 hunger and loses 1 hunger with each use, than an item that restores 2 hunger and loses .5 each time.
A game that forces you to eat just to be more realistic would just be an annoying pain in the neck.
I'm sorry but I don't like this idea