Being A Cannibal In The Fungi Zombie Apocalypse Is Just Dumb
This article contains spoilers for "The Last of Us" on HBO.
The latest episode of "The Last of Us" is a pivotal moment both for the show and the Naughty Dog video game it is based on. the part of the story where Joel and Ellie go from just being two people forced to co-exist for the sake of a mission, and truly become family.
It is also the episode that gives us the closest thing "The Last of Us" (the first game, at least) comes to pure evil, with David and his group. Sure, Kathleen was a violent leader, but she started as a freedom fighter opposing fascism, and her mission was one of noble-ish reasons. Instead, David is an abusive preacher, a cult leader, a would-be rapist, and also a cannibal.
Cannibalism is a staple of the zombie genre, a signifier of the fall of human civilization, and the moment we succumb to becoming no better than the monsters that destroyed the world by eating each other. Unlike the game, "The Last of Us" show makes it clearer that the decision to succumb to cannibalism was a last-case scenario for David and his group, and a recent decision rather than something they embraced early on.
The thing is, cannibalism only works in zombie stories where there is a scarcity of food. This is the universe of "The Last of Us," where every infected is a walking buffet of mushrooms. The eighth episode of the show is hugely important to the story, but it is also a reminder that cannibalism in a fungal apocalypse is just plain dumb.
Food, glorious food!
One aspect of "The Last of Us" that makes it stand out from other zombie stories is its infected. They are not mindless ghouls that rise from the dead and go after brains, but rather a very real and terrifying threat. The Cordyceps fungus slowly steals away its host's body until they are nothing but an empty shell. It's why Parasect is the scariest Pokémon; it is literally an insect whose body is controlled by a giant mushroom.
As scary as this may be, there is one big upside to the outbreak: the world is now filled with millions of infected covered in an edible fungi that actually has some excellent health benefits. That's right, someone has to be brave and say it, the people of "The Last of Us" are wasting their time if they are not just feasting on every clicker they come across.
Granted, this only works in the world of the show. In the game, the real danger is not the infected themselves, but the spores that spread the infection. If you start eating some delicious sautéed mushroom you got from a clicker, you might suddenly inhale some spores and slowly turn into an infected yourself. But in the show? That is not an issue, so eat away! The Cordyceps may have evolved to survive human body temperatures, but no one said anything about a frying pan. The best weapon you can find in the games is a flame thrower, and if those games had Smell-O-Vision, you better believe it would smell delicious.
Why eat the corpse of your friend when you can find some random infected and feast off it? The head of a clicker already resembles a chicken of the woods mushroom, so go ahead, trim the juicy bits off a clicker like you're shaving meat for a kebab, and survive the apocalypse in comfort.
Infected are not friends, they're food
Now, could eating infected be considered cannibalism? That's where things can get a bit tricky. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines cannibalism as "the eating of the flesh of an animal by another animal of the same species," but are the infected still human? I'm not even talking about whether the infected have a soul or if the consciousness of their previous self is still in there somewhere, but about whether they technically still count as being human.
Out of the different types of infected, a runner certainly looks a lot like a regular person with rabies, but what about a clicker? Their body has a lot of fungi around them, particularly on its head, which looks like a giant mushroom. What about a bloater, then? They are quite literally a mastodon fungus, and they look about as human as Swamp Thing does. Once the host body becomes completely covered in fungal growth and its blood is replaced by tendrils, are they still human?
Look at it a different way. You wouldn't really eat the entire infected body, but only the juicy mushroom-looking growths like those coming out of the head of clickers. If you accidentally eat a hair that got in your food, does that make you a cannibal? Hell no. So if you simply cut off the mushroom bits, you're just having a nice meal.
There is a lot of pain and suffering in the world of "The Last of Us," so why add unnecessary hunger to it?