When the civilized world ends and the dead rise to walk the streets, can I use them as a food source, or will zombie flesh turn me into a zombie (either immediately, or after I die from some other cause)?
Does it make a difference if I cook the zombie steak first?
Feel free to answer according to, and qualified by any variant of the zombie mythos as you will - including genres on the very fringe of ‘true’ zombie tradition(s).
Hmmm, not recommended. If you’re talking 28 Days Later zombies, you probably wouldn’t get past the prep stage. You’d lick your finger at some point and off you’d go, rampaging and vomiting up blood.
Any other type of zombie flesh will likely be considered spoiled, and then you die of food poisoning. At which point you’re a zombie.
It can only end in tears. Stick with canned goods and non-perishable items.
According to the Zombie Survival Guide, zombie flesh is deadly poison.
Traditional voodoo zombies, however, can be eaten just like you’d eat anyone else.
Burning some zombie species has been known to spread zombiness, so I don’t think you could cook them. You might be able to eat werewolf meat though.
Normal cooking temperatures don’t reliably inactivate prions, so if the zombie-ism is spread by those, you’d be out of luck.
There’s too many variables to even guess.
What kind of zombie? A Rage Zombie, a Romero ghoul, an O’Bannon brain eater, a Herbert West special, or a standard voodoo zombi? All will have different issues.
Rage Zombies will be infected with the plague, so they’re out.
O’Bannon’s and West’s will be chemically tainted - eating an O’Bannon type’s flesh is likely to turn you, and the West zombies…in the book, it’s not clear what effect, if any, the process has on living flesh (or I’m forgetting the reference)…the movies, however, it’s not healthy. Though entertaining to watch. Some West-types have the added problem of dismembered bits remaining separately animate.
Voodoo zombies, it’s a bit more questionable. It’s generally accepted that their zombiehood is chemically induced, but it’s not quite clear just what the chemicals are, so there’s no way of judging what the effect of the lingering chemicals in the flesh will be, so best to skip them.
Romero ghouls, however, are not animated by anything inherent to the zombies themselves, but rather some unknown factor in the environment - they’re likely to be as safe as any other meat, all other things being equal.
So, we’ve established that a ghoul isn’t inherently unsafe, now we need to consider the other factors, assuming we’re looking at a Romero-style zombie apocalypse.
How fresh is the carcass? Any corpse with enough brain matter left to animate will rise. So, it could be anything from a hobo who died of ebola and has been lying in a ditch for the last month, to a perfectly healthy athlete who just took a baseball bat to the face because you didn’t realize he wasn’t a zombie until too late.
In the former case…ick. In the latter case, it’s as safe as cannibalism ever is… Don’t eat the brain. The real problem is (aside from the moral dimension, but that’s going to go out the window in a zombie apocalypse, anyway)…there’s a grey area where they’ve turned to the point of inedibility, but not in a way that would be obvious, and many diseases wouldn’t present in a way that would be visible (especially in a zombie).
So, even when dealing with Romero ghouls…it’s probably best not to pull out your copy of To Serve Man, not because they’re zombies, but because they’re meat you can’t vouch for.
Well, *you *might be able to, Mr. Eats Everything, but the rest of us probably shouldn’t.
Strong candidate for best user name/title combo of the year.
Eating human flesh, in general, is probably contraindicated. Any diseases or parasites in the carcass are going to be just as happy to colonize you. So you’d have to be very careful in the selection, preparation, and cooking. As someone noted, you’d definitely have to discard the brain and spinal tissue.
Now consider that zombies are essentially animated corpses. The adjective most commonly applied to them is “rotting”. They’re none too fresh. So the best you could hope for is “aged”, and the most likely cut you’d end up with is “putrid”. So even before we get into the question of zombie pathogens, you’d probably do better raiding the cat food aisle of your local post-apocalyptic grocery store.
But assuming you can grab a freshly-turned zombie – say, that person who decided to explore the basement alone with just a guttering flashlight and a broken 2x4 for protection. In most zombie movies, the disease is transmitted via bite. So it’s apparently a saliva-transmitted disease, not unlike rabies. That argues that cooking could potentially kill it – aside from prion-based diseases, most everything else is killed by high temperatures. So…I dunno. Assuming we’re in Day 7 of a zombie siege and the pantry is down to nothing but cans of corned beef hash – I might risk it. But I’d definitely go for well-done, not rare. And I’d chuck their organs, even if they do contain their courage. Their tasty, tasty courage.
If you do, make sure you have plenty of Pepto on hand–zombies tend to come back up.
Oh, salt apparently can kill (some) zombies. So use plenty of salt.
What? They can eat our brains but we can’t eat theirs? Well, that’s hardly fair!
In the interests of parity, I fully expect you to have been fed to your cellphone later this afternoon.
You cannot eat zombies, however, if you have rum you can drink them.
Both of the first 2 Return of the Living Dead movies have healthy living characters exposed to Trioxin gas. It both cases it slowly transforms them into zombies. And it that god-awful direct-to-DVD RotLD 5: Rave from the Grave small amounts of Trioxin taken orally have a and Ectasy-like effect, but repeated doses eventually turned users into zombies.
I think you can, but you’d have to be pretty darn hungry to *want *to. My advice: find a Zombie who was a vegan in life, and slaughter carefully to avoid both blood and spinal fluid. Dispose of all central nervous system parts very carefully. Salt (or brine for 24 hours) and roast to well-done. Sorry, rare zombie steak is just asking for trouble. Feed to dog or buddy before consuming.
Didn’t that guy with the eyepatch and beard advocate using Romero zombies as a food source? I reckon if you can’t trust a guy with an eyepatch and beard, who can you trust?
Bravo!
Another problem would be, at what point would it actually stop moving? Can’t bits of zombie usually move by themselves? So if you are sitting down to a nice piece of zombie steak, presumably it wouldn’t keep still. I’m sure having chewed pieces of zombie meat trying to find their way out of your intestinal tract isn’t particularly pleasant.
It depends on whose rules the zombies are following. If they’re the Romero type zombies that can be killed by headshots then as soon as you sever a bodypart from it’s nervous system that part will stop moving. If they’re O’Bannon type zombies that headshots don’t kill then each bodypart will keep moving long after it was seperated.