Brian Earl Spilner said:
Saw an article where the creator confirmed the cause of the outbreak was contaminated grain/bread. And Joel/Sarah both narrowly avoided getting sick.
- No pancakes for breakfast
- Turned down the biscuits
- Sarah didn't eat a cookie
- Forgot to pick up a birthday cake
Mind blown.
Hmm, thinking about this more, I'm not sure if I like it from an internal logic sense. First, it would likely have just been a single mill contaminated, so the probability that a single piece of baked good would contain flour from the mill in Jakarta would be astronomically low, and Sarah and Joel were likely in no danger.
However, if we are to take his comments at face value, and Joel and Sarah were both nearly exposed to contaminated baked goods then nearly every batch of flour in the world is contaminated with spores. This would then mean that every single person in the world would have died within days.
There is not a conceivable way that there would be any survivors, at least in the United States if his comment is cannon for the world. The apocalypse happened too quickly for the contamination to have ever been widely known as the reason for the outbreak, so basically nearly everyone in the world would be in the dark about the dangers of eating grain. And given the ready supply of baked goods in the United States, those foods would have quickly been ransacked from stores and homes in the first few days after the start of the apocalypse and lead to mass zombification among the initial survivors. The only people who would be spared are keto-warriors (which probably wouldn't exist post-apocalypse).
There is also the fact that Ellie is seen eating bread with her sandwich, which implies a comfort with eating baked goods which I can't imagine anyone would be comfortable doing if the survivors knew the entire apocalypse was set off by eating or being exposed to contaminated flour, which would imply that 1. no one ever knew about the flour contamination, and 2. Every single one of the survivors would have had to have, coincidentally, never touched a baked good in the first few years after the apocalypse.
So basically it makes much more sense from in-universe logic that Joel and Sarah were likely never in danger, and the likelihood of eating contaminated grain was more of a one in a million occurrence, but given Indonesia is a major exporter of flour, that was enough to at least seed small pockets of zombies world wide, which then spread like wild fire. So I'm going to stick with that as my head cannon.
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