The Zombie Diet, Why Eat People?

One thing I have never really been able to understand about the zombie lifestyle is really their defining characteristic – Why eat people? I mean reanimated corpse or not, why decide to chomp on a juicy 20-something college student instead of a T-bone.

I know what you’re saying, “Brock, you have way too much time on your hands,” or “You don’t have that many friends to you?” but these are things that keep my brain up at night. That and about four Red Bulls.

So let’s hit the hypothetical highway, you have just been converted from a vegan to a member of the undead horde with little or no free will and self awareness i.e. just like Katie Holmes. You shamble, let’s go classic here people, and look like a cross between road kill and an over ripe blueberry.

You spy with you puss covered eye ball a few college students drinking and have sex on a nearby gravestone. Let’s face it, that’s what all college students do in horror films and are usually skewered soon after. What goes through that zombified head of yours?

Do you hunker behind a gravestone and watch them go at it like a peeping zombie? Maybe get your zombie wank on? (Like, I was the only one that thought of it.)  Does your fight or flight instinct kick in and you run away terrified? Do you attack the nubile and flexible teens with your slow undead body?

All of these seem like logical possibilities. But why would a zombie look at these people and say “Wow, that blond would look great with a little ranch dressing and some baby carrots.”

There are two basic instincts that rule the human body and those are procreation and eating. You can argue that zombies are little more than walking balls of animal instinct, but why are they hungry at all? There aren’t a lot of animals in the wild that go killing things willy nilly unless they are hungry. Lions in Africa don’t stalk gazelles for the fun of it.

Zombies on the other hand will eat and eat and eat even though they have no functioning intestinal or stomach system. They will eat to the point that their stomachs literally explode, as told in World War Z. I don’t think a zombie is going to pass up on munching down on a person just because he ate an hour before. “No, go ahead I am not going to eat you. I just had a trucker about an hour ago and I am stuffed. Can you come back around 5:30, I am sure I will be hungry again?”

My personal belief is the zombie’s drive to eat human flesh is not about actually eating the flesh, but because it is a method of procreation. Zombies cannot procreate in the normal way, something I am more than a little grateful for. That’s one aspect that’s even too disturbing for me and something that should never be touched with a 10-foot pole.

One of a zombie’s biggest strengths is that he can create hundreds of new zombies within a short period of time just by biting. It’s the real reason they are a threat. It’s similar to the way a virus will use a host. If you have a cold and sneeze in someone’s face, the virus can pass to them.

When a zombie bites a person, their mojo gets passed on like some kind of zombie orgasm. So if it isn’t bad enough that zombies are the red headed stepchildren of the horror world, they are also simply vessels for procreation.