Talking to a zombie is oddly pleasant. Then you see the pictures of them eating rotten food.


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For most people, seeing an image of a moldy banana on the timeline is a surefire sign that the internet’s content has been exhausted and that you should probably log off for the day. For members of “zombietwt,” however, this could simply be someone sharing a snack that they plan on diving into, paired with lustful posts around raw meat or strawberries covered in a thick layer of green fuzz.


If you’ve come across posts like these, congratulations: you’ve officially entered “zombietwt,” an online subculture in which people role-play as, or, in some cases, feel that they genuinely are, zombies.


To hear those in the scene describe it, zombietwt partially emerged from edtwt, which are abbreviations for “zombie twitter” and “eating disorder twitter” respectively. While the latter has been around for a while, the former is a recent development, with its founding being attributed to an X user who goes by the name Cruddy Mary.



“I use Twitter to vent about, erm, everything, and in January I decided, you know, ‘Fuck being an average venting account — I’m going to incorporate a zombie aesthetic into everything and low-key LARP as one because that’s way too fun,” Mary tells me.


Soon, Mary began casually role-playing as a zombie. Some posts would joke about eating brains; others lamented being full of worms. Although some of these posts were tagged with #zombietwt, the term was still fairly ambiguous and its spread was only limited to a few people.


That quickly changed after Mary posted a thread listing everything she ate in April of this year, complete with pictures. This delectable spread included fish heads, candy found on the ground, “chicken jello,” tea made with rotten milk and more.


The images in this thread, despite the name “zombietwt” affixed to the post, were no LARP — Mary was genuinely eating these things, and with this post gaining steam on X, she soon found a group of others who had been doing the same thing.



“It blew tf up,” she says of the thread. “Loads of people were suddenly asking wtf [zombietwt] is and asking how to join.”


While perhaps not the intention of Mary’s thread, she had accidentally discovered a group of people related by their love of zombies, rotten food, sickly imagery and, in some cases, “pica,” or “an abnormal desire to eat substances … not normally eaten,” per Merriam-Webster.


One of those initial group members was X user decompcutie. Looking back, she says she long had a fascination with rotting foods. However, her family generally didn’t keep food around long enough to get to the point of attracting mold. When she eventually found such a spoiled dish in person, the sight deeply affected her. “The first experience I have with even seeing [rotten food was] at a friend’s house,” she explains. “There was always something about it that attracted and interested me.”



Discussions about, and images of, spoiled food came to define the early days of zombietwt. “It was kinda about myself and my own problems, selfishly,” Mary says of the initial posts. “I eat mold because of my own specific form of pica, and I have a fear of food waste so I DON’T waste food. Other people with my specific pica found me and, I guess, joined — and also relate to that feeling, like a ‘zombie’ thing, you know?”


Early zombietwt threads were rife with images of food that was clearly long past its expiration date. This was sometimes labeled “grosspo,” or “gross inspiration”: a term borrowed from eating disorder Twitter to indicate food that was so disgusting that it would turn you off of the idea of eating entirely — though, as you might be able to tell from the previous descriptions of people drinking spoiled milk, this take on “grosspo” doesn’t fully apply to the zombie community.


While zombietwt may have started as a rotten-food-laden role-play exercise, soon, people were taking the zombie ideology to heart. What had begun as a way to play pretend had evolved into an entire lens through which to view the world. The casual element still remained for many, but a few found within zombietwt a community that seemed to better reflect their experience of the world than any other. “For myself personally, I relate more to the living dead feeling of it,” says Toxic.



Toxic recalls that he had originally begun his account to share his experience with eating disorders. When he found Mary’s post, and a community forming around “being a zombie,” this changed. “I related to it since I’ve survived quite a few things as a child, and since then, I’ve kinda gone through life on auto-pilot — or, in other words, as a zombie,” he shares.


Decompcutite had a similar experience. “I feel like a zombie and have since I was young,” she details. “The feeling of being dead and shambling around, I’ve always identified with. I even scare people with my presence, like a zombie would. Whether or not it’s mold-related, we all commune under the idea that we’re ‘walking dead.’”


“The reason I identify with the term ‘zombie’ is because I’ve always felt kind of numb, like I don’t experience emotions properly,” adds Toxic. “That could be because I have autism, borderline personality disorder and depression — just several mental health issues, and identifying as a zombie feels almost like a way to [make] it into something fun. It certainly makes it less stressful to deal with.”



Zombies aren’t a particularly new idea, depending on one’s definition of a zombie. Numerous religions contain texts about the undead rising from the grave, and in the modern day, psychologists have noted a phenomenon called “Cotard’s syndrome,” a disorder where someone fully believes that they’ve already died, despite manifold evidence to the contrary.


Although few on zombietwt appear to claim a diagnosis of this particular condition, many have an incident or series of incidents that they mark as a turning point in their life — in other words, the death of their old self. Mary, for example, recounts an experience in which she was almost murdered. Others have recalled childhood trauma, depression or suicidal ideation as moments when they began to shift their understanding of living. In some cases, users will list a date on their profile in which they “turned” into a zombie — usually, this is just part of the role-play, but for some, it could have a deeper meaning.



“I’ve seen a lot of other people like me associate it with some kinda traumatic event that made you feel completely different, and more like a zombie,” Mary says.


But what does this online lifestyle actually look like for those in the scene? Apart from the extraordinary eating habits, things are pretty normal. Discussions about daily life, memes — basically, it’s the exact sort of conversation that you’d expect an online community to have, so long as you don’t count all of the images of rotten raspberries.



However, as with any niche community with practices seen as “not normal,” the group has been subject to considerable harassment. Although those inside the community say that the space is generally supportive, inboxes of those who have joined #zombietwt can be flooded with some of the worst sorts of messages that can be found on the internet. “There’s definitely a lot of drama, as people get really mad when they see others doing things outside of the norm,” notes Toxic. “There [are] consistently death threats and wishing of harm upon us.”


“I’ve gotten LOADS of death threats,” Mary adds. “Death threats, rape threats and ‘you should go kill yourself’ messages. But if you’re on the internet, you’ve gotta expect that from other terminally online losers.”


This hostility may be part of the reason why, for many in the community, awareness of this part of their personality doesn’t tend to leave the internet. Mary says she hasn’t told anyone about her online zombieness and pica, though a couple of her offline friends are aware. Toxic claims that his friends and family never noticed his pica, and to this day, the “zombie” behavior is mostly private, barring what he chooses to share on the internet. “I mostly feel comfortable talking about it online,” he reveals. “However, my fiancé, who isn't online, also supports me in this. He just gets upset sometimes when I eat mold as he worries I’ll get sick.”



To be clear, this is a legitimate fear. It likely doesn’t need to be said, but eating moldy fruit, vegetables, meat, bread and pretty much any other food or food-like substance you can think of isn’t good for your health and can lead to some pretty severe health consequences, including death. Plus, it’s not as though repeated exposure to moldy or rotten foods acclimates one’s stomach. Mold comes in a variety of forms, and while your tummy may build an immunity to some foreign bacteria given enough time, there’s insufficient evidence to suggest that the body can make this same adjustment with rotten food.


People in the zombietwt community are aware of this — in fact, some will say it openly, though many claim that they’ve never gotten sick from their diet apart from the occasional stomach ache. That said, to them, there’s not much they can do about it. Members describe engaging in this specific form of pica since before the advent of zombietwt, with the community emerging as a place for them to feel less “weird” about having this specific condition.



Of course, with that comes the idea that the zombies of the internet are promoting the “rotten food” lifestyle. Mary insists that this isn’t the case. “I have no idea how it’s promoting it at all,” she says of the posts about eating spoiled food. “People just post about it and document it.”


“And we’re just so unserious,” she continues. “Like, we take a picture of some moldy food or a candy we found on the road, and everyone’s just like ‘yumm,’ ‘wow ur so lucky,’ ‘im jealous’ — it’s literally not serious. Nobody’s going off telling anyone to ‘start doing this so you can join us,’ and people can still interact and even join zombietwt even if they dont wanna eat the shit we do.”


“There’s no competition to be the ‘worst eater,’ or whatever,” Mary concludes, “but there will be the stereotype, unfortunately.”


What comes next for zombietwt is uncertain. Mary says she hopes to lean further into the role-play element of it, while others say they’re content to keep living their internet zombie lives. Pica has always been only a part of zombietwt, and as the community grows, Mary and others say that they hope the group can focus on being a supportive place for all, not just those who enjoy the occasional nibble on some furry bread.


“This community is very accepting. It’s been, by far, the most supportive group of people I’ve ever met on the internet,” declares Toxic. “We will talk to anyone. We have several group chats with non-zombie members. You don’t need to even relate to the zombie terms — as long as you’re going to be a nice person, anyone is welcome.”