The Last Of Us, Realism In Entertainment And Food Insecurities

By on April 4, 2023

Spoiler Alert – This post will contain very mild spoilers for the limited TV series The Last Of Us. If you haven’t yet watched season one of this series, you might wish to skip this post.

It will also deal with food insecurities. If you are sensitive to this content, (big hugs), stars, do I understand a bit of what you’re enduring. You might wish to skip this post.

The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I REALLY enjoyed the first season of The Last Of Us. It was brilliant, brilliant storytelling. The character arcs were amazing.

And their handling of food insecurity wasn’t at all traumatic for me.

I grew up not eating every day and I struggle with the ghosts of that food insecurity every dang moment.

Our pantries are stocked with dried and canned food. Our dedicated freezer is crammed with frozen meat, milk, bread, veggies and juice.

The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I could feed ourselves for at least a year with the food we keep in reserves (and rotate to keep fresh).

Most post apocalyptic stories deal with food insecurities and The Last Of Us is no exception to this.

But The Last Of Us deals with it so brilliantly wrongly that it is a constant reminder it is a fictional story. And I suspect this was a deliberate choice by the creators.

For example, EVERYONE knows if ingredients are short, you make soup (not stew, soup). Soup kitchens exist for a reason. This is common knowledge.

On The Last Of Us, an entire pot of soup could have been made from just one of the pools of freshly spilled deer blood the characters spotted in the snow.

Yet these supposedly starving characters walked by numerous pools of blood, leaving that valuable resource in the snow.

And very little soup (if any) is made on the show at all. This was such a big omission it had to be intentional.

About that deer, some of the characters hunted deer. Hunting is energy intensive.

Yet they had an entire river or lake filled with fish waiting to be caught. Which the creators relayed to viewers again and again with their ‘river of death’ mentions and their screenshots of canoes.

The characters also had forests stocked with healthy pine trees (which the creators, again, brought our attention to).

As many Northern folks know, a tea/soup consisting of boiled pine needles contains massive amounts of vitamin C (and also vitamin A). That’s a food source right there!

All these ‘errors’ (which were so blatant they HAD to be deliberate) allowed me to enjoy The Last Of Us and not deal with my food insecurities.

Inaccuracies in entertainment can reinforce the escapism feel to it. And that can be a very good thing!


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His human female is attempting to kill him.
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