When you get your food served up, the last thing you’re expecting to do is see it leap off your plate and onto the floor.
You’ve seen the headline, you know that’s exactly what you’re about to see and the video below contains the exact moment that some meat appeared to crawl right off the plate.
Naturally it drew comparisons with the world of the walking dead pretty much immediately, but fortunately the beginning of the zombie apocalypse hasn’t come because someone ate meat that was still twitching on the plate.
That hasn’t stopped people from freaking out, though when your food gets up off the plate and walks off by itself there’s something understandable about screaming in horror.
Fortunately there’s a good explanation for all of this that isn’t ‘the dead have risen’, and even if it was the start of the zombie apocalypse you’d be quite glad that patient zero was a chunk of meat with no ability to bite anything.
As for why this particularly cut of meat appears to have continued twitching for some time after death, this is apparently because it’s a fresh cut of flesh being exposed to a lot of salt.
Snopes did a bit of a fact check on this and apparently the neurons were still active in this chunk of meat, meaning that it reacted to the sodium ion that can be found in salt and soy sauce.
Thus the exposure to salt makes the still existing muscles in the meat contract even though it’s dead, allowing the meat to appear as though it’s still alive and flopping around like a zombie.
They also suggested that the meat we could see in the video had come from a frog, so no wonder it was hopping mad about having been killed and plated up.
They suggested that this footage might have come from a restaurant that does something called ‘ikizukuri’, where live seafood is prepared.
It’s normally a process for fish, but it can be done for frogs as well.
So there you have it, this actually could have been precisely what happened to make it seem as though the ‘zombie’ meat was actually moving.
There’s no free will left here, just the rote mechanical triggering of mechanisms soon to decay into uselessness and be consumed to grant some other being a scant few hours of energy before it must consume again.