If the OP wants more challenge he should try eating zombie meat. I was using it last night while working on a blaze grinder and was constantly having to much that stuff to keep my hunger bar up and my health recovering. There's something about the stuff. It always leaves me wanting more(Braaaaiiinssss).
Just an FYI for the OP and for everyone else in this thread. The wilderness on EMC is set to Easy Difficulty. It is in the workings that a Hardcore Server is to be released in the distant future which will cater for the needs of players who want more of a challenge.
there is a thirst mod, i posted a post in this thread about it, with a link to it, and Chimneyswift11 did a mod review on it.
Hardcore minecrafter? There are servers for that. This is EMC, We don't want it to be to hard that if you go into the wild, you die immediately, But we don't want it to be to easy, If you want hardcore minecrafting, this may not be your server. We do want to make it challenging, but everyone has different opinions.