The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The many ways to die

3) “You are what you eat.”

“You are what you eat” is kind of the short way of saying that, if you eat healthy, you get healthy and, if you eat junk, you get junk. It was a simple saying designed to try to get people to eat healthier.

Well, this idea becomes very important once you’re forced to take charge of your very survival. Once you’re forced to push your body to its limits to fight or stay ahead of zombies, and you’re forced to scrounge, hunt, or grow your own food, the idea of trying to maintain good eating habits suddenly becomes more than just a slogan. Your survival now depends on eating well enough to have the energy and strength to keep fighting, and neglecting that can lead to disaster.

While some people might think they could just eat anything and keep themselves going, in practice, that could easily turn around and bite you…no pun intended. If you don’t know what you can and can’t eat, you might wind up snacking on a delicious mushroom, only to discover it is deadly poisonous, and quite painful, to boot.

Or, you may not prepare some animal you caught properly and end up with any number of nasty side effects: Food poisoning, bacterial infection, or intestinal parasites, which, as we just covered, with the limited medicine you’ll probably have, any one of those could easily kill you.

And, if anyone suggests eating the undead when other food seems depleted, let me ask you this: Even without the formaldehyde used in embalming them, would you go dig up a corpse from the cemetery and eat it? I don’t think so. If you tried, I think the phrase “You are what you eat” would become just a bit literal…