I think you're reading some things into what I said to make it magical, but it's not important. I'm just ideating because you got me excited about an idea.
What about a subtler zombie pathogen that merely rewires your brain to make you allergic to everything but meat. It would have longer to spread, and the increase in consumption would probably cause a general environmental collapse.
You'd have aspects of cannibalism, societal collapse, and dramatic infection deceit scenes and nobody would ever look like a zombie.
People would have to publicly eat plants to prove they're not zombies to enter secure areas. Remember the time Arby's made a fake carrot that was made of meat? They called it a megetable. That's real. What if the infected wormed their way into the food industry and started mislabeling things to muddy the waters due to social stigma?
Scientific zombies wouldn't necessarily look dead, and a real version would be way less overt.
My Bethesda rant goes something like this: "they think the ideal video game is when you can treat everything like action figures, make anything happen in any combination just to see it happen, bash em together, pull them apart, make them kiss, make them join every team and do every thing, do whatever you want, and then fuck off because it never meant anything".
Times like these I think the Hellenes had it right with the idea of xenia.