Food provides replenishment to your health (red) and hunger (blue) meters:



You lose a small portion of hunger around every 30 in-game minutes. You lose health either through starvation or taking damage from Dreamers. There is no need to drink even though there is water (more on that later).

The most efficient use of your food is to use it to fill both meters where possible; if you're constantly using food just for hunger then you aren't thinning out the dreamers enough.

There are 7 loot-able only foods:



These obviously should be picked up whenever possible, but both "Food" and "Canned Food" should be the priority and will form the basis of your food stores at the early stage of a level. "Beverage Cans" are the only other plentiful food type but provide only half of the hunger benefit. The other food types are extremely rare, only finding 1-2 on a level, to the point where there's no point comparing them to the more abundant types.

There are 6 farm-able food types which can be found already planted and separately as their produce items:



I recommend growing one health crop and one food crop since you rarely need both meters filling at the same time. Strawberry and Wheat are the clear winners when it comes to health and hunger respectively- the rest are situational alternatives for when you can't find either of those.

All of the farm-able food types listed above can be farmed by planting the produce item in a Pot, Basket or Trough. Water is the resource consumed, and different size containers hold different quantities of water. There doesn't appear to be any benefit of using one size pot over another (other than the inability to grow certain food types in under-sized containers). Likewise, growing shared plants in a trough doesn't appear to have any additional benefit to growth rate or water consumption.

Only the Flower Pots can be relocated, so I recommend using these exclusively for farming:


As water is held in the container, a good strategy is to "Bushwhack" (remove) non farm-able plants as early as possible to retain the water. This would be situational for farm-able plants depending on what type is already growing as well as the water level since there is a longer period (than listed above per type) after which something is planted and when it can be harvested. Spoiler: The relocated pots start with a default water value. This is definitely bug, will be reported, and therefore cannot be relied upon.

Water can be relocated using the containers and receptacles:


With a receptacle in your inventory, either click on a container (pre-opened if it's a barrel) and click "Insert Receptacle" or drag-and-drop it from your inventory to the indicated location next to the container. You will then have the option to "Fill Receptacle" to siphon the water from the container:




With the filled receptacle picked up in your inventory a plant (container) can then be watered by selecting it and clicking "Irrigate". Please note that the last receptacle in the inventory is used for this purpose, even if empty to no effect. Ensure a container is sufficiently watered before planting anything otherwise it will instantly die.

• The meters themselves were used to estimate (albeit very accurately with 4K pixels) the health and hunger increase of certain foods. Various data-points were collected just after a hunger tick and averaged due to small discrepancies. Values are a percentage of total; no code decompiling was performed for this guide
  
• Water consumption is also an estimate since plants do not consume on an integer basis nor does the total consumption for a harvest. For consistency, all water consumption readings were taken from a freshly harvested and fully irrigated plant to the exact point at which they could be harvested again
  
• Time is a reading of in-game hours (you will need to convert decimals to minutes *60) from when a fully grown plant was harvested and then harvest-able again.