Three episodes in to The Last Of Us, and the HBO show has already inspired a new wave of nightmares in me. Now I’m afraid of fungi taking over my nervous system, mushroom zombies shoving their infected tongues down my throat with a gross kiss, and never knowing a true love like Frank (Murray Bartlett) and Bill (Nick Offerman) do. However, the thing that I am now most shockingly terrified of isn’t the threat of clickers or living life in an apocalyptic hellscape. It’s carbs.
In case you missed the “breadcrumbs” in The Last of Us Episode 1 or missed the reference to flour factories in the Jakarta-based Episode 2 flashback, Joel (Pedro Pascal) bluntly explains the origin of the show’s zombie apocalypse to Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in Episode 3. After the 14-year-old shares her theory of the virus’s origin to Joel, he corrects her fantasies of infected monkeys going bananas. He says that mass-produced flour secretly teeming with Cordyceps spread the dangerous fungi quickly all over the world. People ingested the flour either in their own bakes or in pre-made foods. A few hours later, they turned and began feasting on the low-carb assholes in their lives. The cycle continued from there.
So basically, the most dangerous food group in The Last of Us isn’t the lowly mushroom or even a botulism-bloated can of old beans. It’s carbs.
Now, I need to give credit where credit’s due. I’m not the brilliant Last of Us-loving super fan who put the flour theory together. I didn’t even know if I believed Joel’s take on the apocalypse’s origin story when I watched the Episode 3 screener last week! It was only when I watched my pal Ryan Arey’s ScreenCrush video about The Last of Us Episode 2, that I realized the scope of big carb’s role in the destruction of Joel and Ellie’s world.
You see, in the show’s 20 minute cold open, we don’t just watch as Joel loses his beloved daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) in the first 24 hours of the outbreak. We see how Joel, Sarah, and Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) managed to evade infection.
First, there’s no time for them to have the planned pancakes for breakfast. Then, both Joel and Sarah awkwardly avoid eating their elderly neighbor’s homemade biscuits, with Joel quipping he’s on Atkins. Later we watch as Sarah bakes cookies with her neighbors, but she doesn’t eat them. (These same neighbors are the first people we see succumb to Cordyceps later in the episode and it’s grisly.) Later, when Sarah gives Joel his birthday present, they lament that there’s no birthday cake to enjoy.
While Sarah will later perish at the hands of an overly skittish military, everyone in Joel’s family escapes infection because they didn’t eat the carbs.
Now is this enough to put me off carbs for good? No. I’ve already had a sandwich and pizza and and a bagel since learning about the flour/Cordyceps connection in The Last of Us. It has, however, made me feel a little skittish about buying low quality flour next time I’m at the grocery store. Maybe I’ll opt for a more artisanal batch made by a smaller, remote company and not the mass-produced stuff.
The bottom line is the ‘shrooms are innocent! Go ahead and sauté some baby bella mushrooms with your weeknight stir fry this week. It won’t turn you into a monster. Consider swapping your cheeseburger on a roll for a bun-less grilled Portabella next time you’re out with friends at a gastropub. It’s not going to turn you into a Bloater down the line! But what might kill you — provided you believe that the threat of becoming a soul-less, cannibalistic, cog in a fungal colony is real — is digging into that free bread basket.
The Last of Us‘s biggest villain isn’t a monster, but good old-fashioned grain-based food groups. And if you like carbs as much as I do, that is terrifying.
