4 Ways Horse Meat Proves a Zombie Apocalypse Can Happen

4 They Both Started With Corporations

In Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation created the zombie virus as a weapon in biological warfare. The virus then spread to the outside world because of lab failures and experiments gone wrong. In the case of the horse meat scandal, there are multiple corporations implicated, and all of them are pointing their slimy fingers at third-party meat suppliers. But it's really the same story: A big company with lots of loose strands releases some bad meat/zombie-inducing pathogens into the world. And in both cases, all an outbreak would really require is one dubious employee at the right level of infrastructure to go lip-wigglingly bananas.

3 The Contamination Spread Through Crappy "Restaurants"

In Zombieland, one of the first things we learn is that patient zero (the person who started the outbreak) got the undead-itis from eating a gas station burger contaminated with mad cow disease, presumably before he or she could succumb to the hepatitis normally associated with meat you buy at a gas station.

Meanwhile, in the horse meat saga, it turns out IKEA was selling Swedish meatballs to their customers that were supposed to be beef and pork but were actually the ground-up birthday wishes of heartbroken little girls. Then, we found out that horseflesh was also being served at British Taco Bells, which is actually better than the fingernails and roach husks they normally serve.

So, terrible food bought from less-than-reputable places (at least from a food service standpoint) can easily carry some kind of pathogen and go undetected. Let's say Banana Sandwich, our crazy employee from the previous entry, inserts the G-virus into some horse meat and sends it out the door. It could pass through IKEA and Taco Bell even more quickly than Taco Bell typically passes through a person, spreading like wildfire among citizens who care about their health just enough to buy food from a pretend Mexican restaurant and a furniture store.

2 We Can't Stop the Contamination

In films like Zombieland, Day of the Dead, and Resident Evil, we never see the zombie contamination effectively contained in any way. We just see Woody Harrelson bludgeoning ghouls with a banjo, and he can't be expected to be available 24/7. The bottom line is, it's difficult to contain something if you don't even know where and how it started.

And after two months, nobody has one goddamn idea where the horse meat scourge came from. One Swedish food manufacturer blamed their supplier after discovering that their frozen lasagnas were 100 percent horse meat, but even the suppliers have suppliers, and good luck getting any of those guys to come forward. We'll have to either wait for the ghosts of the slaughtered horses to materialize and point their hooves toward the source of the mystery or get the lady from Bones to track down where all the horse bodies are buried. Neither one seems likely to happen anytime soon.

1 We're Probably All Contaminated Already

Even after a dozen European countries got involved in the investigation, the horse meat scandal is hardly front page news anymore. The duplicitous meat showed up in Tesco, the third-largest retailer in the world, and people are still going there to buy beef. To compare, would Americans stop buying food from Walmart if we knew horse meat was being sold there as hamburgers? We can't type "no" hard enough. Millions have probably eaten horse meat by now.

Now imagine that the horse meat had been laced with whatever rapidly mutating zombie virus Banana Sandwich stole from his manager's office. A huge chunk of the population would already be infected with shambling corpse disease, and it wouldn't take long before they ate/infected twice as many more.

Hence, horsemeat = zombie outbreak = we are all screwed. Enjoy your day.

Josh wants to be your friend on Facebook.