The Last Of Us viewers are arguing over whether you can eat infected

I’ll be honest, dear reader, in all my time playing and watching The Last of Us, I’ve never for one moment considered whether or not it’d be safe to chomp a mushroom off a clicker’s face and eat it. After seeing the question posed on Reddit though, I genuinely can’t stop thinking about it.

As TheGamer reports, one Reddit user has profoundly upset the entire TLoU fandom by asking about the logistics of consuming infected. Not the human parts of them, mind you, but the Cordyceps mushrooms growing from them. Would it be safe if you fried them? Maybe if you froze them first? Or is there a reason why this has never been addressed in the source material? I have so many questions.

While you’re here, take a look at the trailer for The Last of Us episode eight below.

“People eat mushrooms all the time, think about it - cannibalism aside, imagine trimming off the juicy mushroom bits from a clicker, marinating it and roasting it over an open flame, doesn't that sound delicious? This is an apocalypse, there's no way hundreds of people haven't tried it, right?” they questioned. “Look at all the food on a clicker. Actually, you could strap one of those guys down and continuously cut off bits of mushroom to eat? Like a Cordyceps farm? You think no one would try that when people are starving to death?”

Everyone else is absolutely baffled by this suggestion: “[Not gonna lie] this made me chuckle. I don’t think cooking the shrooms would kill the Cordyceps but I am curious now about flavour since you’ve mentioned it,” wrote jessy_pooh. “I believe this is the first time I’ve seen someone pose this question. Thanks, I hate it!” added Vaywen.

Obviously, there’s many things to consider here. Many mushrooms are poisonous when consumed, but in real life, Cordyceps isn’t - in fact, some believe that eating it may have certain health benefits (thanks, Healthline). Secondly though, in the show, it’s established that the outbreak began due to contaminated flour. Flour is, obviously, baked before consumption in various products, which implies that high temperatures didn’t kill the fungus, and eating it did infect people.

Honestly though, I really want to believe that somehow, it would be possible to safely eat the mushrooms. Maybe, as was speculated on Reddit, they just need to be cooked at a higher temperature? There’s got to be someone out there in the world of The Last of Us who’s tried flipping an Uno reverse card on a hungry infected.