On the other hand, I’d always been a meat-and-two-veg kind of person, having inherited the habit from Dad via Mum, so the two major shifts associated with conversion by anecdotal evidence—a keener appetite for meat and a marked distaste for highly-spiced food—didn’t really apply to me. It’s possible, of course, that the former shift is all in the mind—not just the minds of zombies but those of their living observers. When you borrow a word like “zombie” from the lexicon of the folkloristic and cinematic imagination to apply to an actual but novel phenomenon, there’s bound to be a certain amount of mythical pollution. Because the zombies of modern legend were supposed to be driven by cannibalistic appetites, it was only natural that some such suspicion should fall on the actual beneficiaries of medical resurrection, if not in any serious sense, at least in jest. Nor is it surprising that the suspicion should be carefully toned down to credible proportions.
