Is flour the key to The Last of Us? A real case would explain why Joel survives

Just when we were beginning to mentally overcome the coronavirus pandemic, the series of The Last of Us has arrived to remove all those emotions of fear and confusion by incorporating a new disease on television: the infection of Cordyceps. For now we only have two episodes of the fiction signed by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, also responsible for the Naughty Dog game as you know, and that has already allowed viewers to generate all kinds of theories about how this fungal apocalypse was born and how it is. that neither Joel nor Tommy nor Sarah were infected during the outbreak. The theory that has spread the most is related to flour. The main characters of The Last of Us they flee from various sweet products that contain that ingredient, which indicates that thanks to this they were not infected at the beginning of the story.

A real case from 1951 supports the idea that Joel did not get infected in The Last of Us thanks to not eating flour

This theory, even though it seems untenable, has taken root thanks to a real case that has become quite popular: what is known as the mass poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951. Fresh out of World War II in Europe, a rather incredible altercation took place in France that took the lives of up to seven people and caused another 50 to have to be transferred to nursing homes. In total, there were 250 people affected by what was known as ergot poisoning (although other sources point out that the source of that poison would come from mercury, mycotoxins or nitrogen trichloride). It is even believed that even the CIA itself (United States Central Intelligence Agency) poison part of that French population to test a type of hallucinogen.

Those 250 people will have eaten bread from Roch Briand, who was accused of contaminating the flour used with a type of fungus similar to LSD, which explains the hallucinations of the dozens of people who ingested this product. in the series of The Last of Us It is explained that fungal infections do not occur in humans, and that they could only take place, reproducing the same infection process that we see in insects such as ants, if fungi evolved and could survive at human body temperature. If we take that fictional idea and couple it with the actual flour contamination that took place in 1951, We can conclude that this mentioned flour would be the key to start and massively spread the infection. that arises in The Last of Us, and that in the series of would have used that food as a way of contamination. The infected, already dominated by Cordyceps, will take care of the rest.