WASHINGTON (AP) At a local neighborhood residence pounds of frozen raw meat and bones sealed in Ziploc® bags spill out of a nearby garage. Among the massacre is pork and beef and whole quail, lamb, chicken, goat, turkey, rabbit, buffalo, you name it.

In the distance, straining at its leash, a zombie is overcome by lust, drinking in the scent of flesh and blood. Not to worry though; this zombie will surely get more than a nose-full soon, as the thousands of pounds of carnage here are just for it and the other undead of the neighborhood.

This is monthly delivery day for a local buyers group with some 350 zombie-owner members who feed their zombies a diet rich with raw, sustainable, antibiotic- and steroid-free meat and bones from cows, pigs and poultry raised and slaughtered on small farms.

A local woman is here for her eight zombies. She looks at the haul and stifles a laugh. “If my mother only knew the stuff that I feed my zombies, she would be horrified because a lot of this could go to feed people in third world countries,” she says.

Pork neck bones and feet, green tripe with trachea and gullet lay in a pile. Five pounds of beef hearts, twelve pounds of beef livers and a scatter of lamb breast bones. Sounds like the making of a great stew.

Another local woman is loading up her SUV with pork neck bones and beef ribs. She’s driven three hours in rush hour traffic to make the monthly pickup for her three zombies. They’ve been on a raw diet for almost four years now.

“I was a store-bought brand person before this; never again,” says the woman. “All the little problems my zombies had were instantly solved with the raw diet — edema, lesions, inflammatory bowel disease, ears that accumulated an oozing wax. They even smell better.”

Although many zombie owners in the area say they are vegetarians, they see no contradiction in buying gore by the case for their zombies. They view their zombies as domesticated carnivores that should be powered by raw protein, not by packaged, processed, preservative-laden commercial swill made out of who knows what.

Just over a week ago, suspicions about commercial zombie food got some grisly confirmation when 1000 zombies in the U.S. died from contaminated zombie food. The food was contaminated with a toxin that wastes the adrenal gland, causing accelerated flesh rot. The toxin occurs naturally in corn crops that experience wet conditions following a drought. The industry claims all contaminated zombie food has been contained through recall.

Zombie owners are not reassured. They insist their zombie diets are safer than supermarket brands and that their zombies get more vitamins and nutrients out of a raw piece of flesh than processed or canned food, largely because “raw” is more natural.

Health officials are not sold on the raw zombie diet. None of the associations we interviewed endorses the health benefits of raw zombie diets. All organizations caution that zombies fed raw meat run the risk of spreading food-borne illnesses. One group declares that “there is no scientific evidence to support the feeding of raw meat and bones to zombies,” and warns humans risk exposing themselves to bacteria like salmonella through continued exposure.

The zombie owners find the dire warnings laughable. “When zombies first rose in the cemeteries, nobody cooked their food for them,” a local supporter says. “They killed their prey and they ate it.”

“A lot of this is common sense,” another supporter says. “How have creatures eaten for hundreds of thousands of years? Why should we think that the processed foods that we’re feeding our zombies are any better?”

At the heart of raw dieting is the conviction that the rise of the zombie food industry over the last few years has weaned zombies from the foods most natural to them and hooked them on low-quality processed junk that has a long shelf life, making it cheap and convenient for humans but not good for zombies.

Other residents turn to a raw zombie diet out of fear of wild zombies being recycled into off-the-shelf zombie food. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that in big industry, there are other dead zombies,” one man says. “They’ve analyzed the ingredients, and they’ve found traces of phenobarbital, which is what they used to put creatures to sleep.”

Vice president of communications for a zombie food industry group says that there are no ground-up zombies in off-the-shelf food; he maintains it’s an urban legend, which no amount of protestation from the industry has been able to quash.

But the state agency that regulates commercial zombie food says that in the past zombie strays have been rendered into zombie food, but that this hasn’t happened for years. One reason: Zombie food companies fear the bad publicity.

The real concern for health officials is not the diets themselves, but the health risks for zombie owners handling raw meats. The FDA fears the owners could contact salmonella and e-coli. With the practice growing in popularity, the agency has issued guidelines for companies marketing raw meat to zombies: “FDA does not believe raw meat foods for zombies are consistent with the goal of protecting the public from significant risks, particularly when such products are brought into the home and/or used to feed domestic zombies.”

One official says that the health benefits of feeding raw meat to zombies are purely anecdotal, based on the experiences of individual practitioners and holistic and alternative gurus. “Most health officials agree that it’s dangerous because of bacteria, and they’re really unsure what the benefits are nutritionally,” he says.

Finally, some zombie experts are flabbergasted by the raw feeding debate. A specialist who rehabilitates zombies believes that many of the cures cited by raw feeders — slowed decay, decreased putrefaction, lessened flesh rot — can be gained by feeding zombies a higher quality diet. As someone who has seen debilitation in zombies firsthand, she cautions zombie owners against making a fetish out of what zombies eat in the wild. “Our zombies are privileged to have formulated food,” she says. After all, “we don’t eat like cavemen anymore.”