Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Little Things Get You

4) Contamination

In this past season of Fear The Walking Dead, we saw a death cult (Which I call “The Beginners”) using walkers as fertilizer, the chemicals present in a human body decomposing, enriching the soil they used to grow their fruits, vegetables, and animal feed.

This was all keeping in theme with their philosophy of “The End Is The Beginning” (Hence the nickname I give them), but, upon doing some research, I’m not sure that that would be an especially good idea in practice in an actual zombie apocalypse.

You see, there are at least a couple of chemicals our species produces when our bodies break down that…aren’t very good for the rest of us left behind. While several of them are largely innocuous, a couple of them are downright carcinogenic. How long would The Beginners have been able to go eating food that might have leached toxic chemicals produced by the shambling corpses they were using as compost? Frankly, I don’t think it matters because that’s like asking how long you’d go eating produce grown from the ground that had suffered nuclear contamination! You wouldn’t do it; you’d pick up stakes and move to a place where the ground wasn’t irradiated!

Now, you might be wondering: “Why is this important?” Well, considering the fact there are going to be so many dead people walking and not walking around, that means you could wind up with lots of these noxious chemicals getting into the soil and maybe into the water that you’re using to feed and hydrate yourself, and, worse still, you might not even know it.

How are you supposed to fight something slowly poisoning you when you may not even know it’s there?

…And that’s just the things that are normally in the human body. We haven’t even gotten to the zombie virus! Just imagine you discover (All too late) that a zombie has been using your reservoir or wherever you get your freshwater as its personal bathtub; how long do you think that would go before you’d start turning a zombie yourself?

It’s tough to fight things killing you while you don’t even know they’re there. Your best bet is to make an effort to make sure that you know what’s there. If you know a mass grave or a herd is in your area, you’ll know what land and water are too fouled to use.