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One LongHorn Steakhouse-goer mocked a customer’s steak, which was so rare, it looked like it had been barely kissed by the grill.
Everyone likes their steak their way. And we all have opinions on how others order theirs. Recently, one LongHorn Steakhouse-goer mocked a steak order so rare, it looked like it had been barely kissed by the grill.
Super rare steak is the kind of entree that’d likely leave many people begging for more sides. In this instance, it did more than wipe out the macaroni and cheese; it alerted a TikToker to a possible monster in her midst.
Exactly Who Is In The Dining Room?
Over a caption that says, “Um, so yeah, whose [sic] in the lobby?”
“Your proof vampires and functional zombies walk upon us,” @shaunndadon added.
She’s obviously joking. Vampires and zombies are fictional creatures. Both myths are likely born of humans trying to make sense of the world. People just trying to understand disease, death, and trauma. Arguably, vampirism is the more desirable of the two conditions. Castle living is far more glamorous than hungry wandering.
There’s a theory that the vampire myth partially originated because of a disease called “porphyria.” An inherited blood disease, porphyria “is sometimes referred to as the ‘vampyre disease,’” per Queen’s University.
Porphyria’s symptoms also support the claim. Sufferers are extremely sensitive to sunlight, they have dark red urine that makes it look like they consumed blood, and they avoid garlic. They avoid the allium because its sulfur content can trigger a painful attack. As for the vampire’s vaunted teeth, the disease can cause the gums to recede, and the result looks like fangs.
Combine these highly visible symptoms with limited medical knowledge (the disease was only classified in 1911) and belief in the supernatural. Now Dracula seems like a logical, almost scientific conclusion.
Vampires Vs. Zombies
Zombies are also a response to societal conditions. The word “zombie” has been traced to West Africa. From there, it was transported to Haiti via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In popular media, a zombie is represented as a mindless shambling (sometimes running) consumer of living flesh. There’s another take, though: writer Amy Wilentz says the concept of a zombie is the “logical offspring of New World slavery.”
On Haiti’s brutal sugarcane plantations, escape meant death and paradise. To get to paradise, the person had to be transported there by a deity known as Baron Samedi, the lord of the cemetery. If an individual somehow offended the Baron, they’d be trapped between life and death as a zombie. And a zombie could be made to work in the fields forever.
More recently, zombies have become a not-so-subtle metaphor for contemporary society. They move without direction, mindlessly consume, revealing anxieties about societal collapse. And it’s not a new fear: The epic poem “Gilgamesh” (written between 2000 and 1100 B.C.E.) includes a passage about the dead eating the living. “I shall bring up the dead to consume the living, I shall make the dead outnumber the living,” threatens the goddess Ishtar after Gilgamesh refuses to marry her.
Cooked Food + Larger Brains = Evolution
Admittedly, it is a big leap from super rare steak to societal dread and ancient epic poetry. But it is a theme that is threading through the comments.
“The reason we were able to evolve with such large brains is due to early ancestors discovering the magic of cooking food! more available nutrients per kill/harvest means less energy output per calorie, allowing more energy to go towards brain development,” said @atisocutemad. That’s a nice argument for leaving the meat on the grill just a little bit longer.
Meanwhile, @lexieluna666 tacitly circles back to the blood diseases explanation. She wrote, “I’m anemic and crave raw meat. When I’m preparing our tri-tip I cut off a piece to eat after I’ve seasoned it. My boyfriend just walks out of the kitchen and says “I love that for you babe” but he won’t watch me eat it.”
Then there’s the plethora of users who can’t help but reference the 2011 apocalyptic movie “Legion”—specifically the diner attack scene. In it, an angel posing as an old woman (Gladys Foster) is served a bloody steak, just before telling her server, “Your f—— baby’s gonna burn.”
In the end, it’s highly unlikely that this rare steak is one of the signs of an apocalypse—especially since further in the caption, @shaunndadon reveals a major plot twist: She admits it’s her steak. “Ok, ok….it was MY steak,” she writes.
Chances are, she ate it without any repercussions more serious than gas.
BroBible reached out to @shaunndadon via TikTok direct message and with a comment on the post. We reached out to LongHorn Steakhouse via their listed media contact. We will update this article if either reply.
Dining and Cooking