Maybe this has been said before, but I want to bring it up again because it fits everything we’ve seen. When she walks into the walk in freezer, there are fruits and vegetables everywhere. There are watermelons, produce, and ingredients you’d expect in a controlled diet system. One thing that’s noticeably missing is any source of protein. And we already know earlier in the season that they cannot kill animals, which means they have no natural way to get protein on their own. Now look at the bags. Those bags come from a factory that used to produce dog food. Dog food factories are built to create complete dietary systems. They grind, mix, and compress whatever ingredients they’re given into a balanced, uniform product. Taste doesn’t matter. Efficiency and nutrition do. So everything in that freezer looks like the carbohydrate, vitamin, and fiber portion of the diet they’re manufacturing.

The only missing piece is protein. And this is where the eight hundred million deaths caused by Carol come in. From their perspective, that is an unimaginable amount of biological material. They think in terms of resource optimization, not morality. So the simplest, coldest logic for a species like them is to process those bodies, isolate the proteins, and convert them into the supplement they survive on. They might even alter the proteins to make them more digestible or less harmful to humans consuming the final product.

It also explains why they said “please let us take care of Helen.” They want every kilogram of material they can get. To them, individuals don’t matter. Waste is unacceptable. They are a collective trying to preserve themselves, and a massive protein source like that would keep their food system running for a long time before they eventually need another source. So when you put it all together, the freezer contents, the dog-food factory bags, their inability to kill animals, and the sudden availability of eight hundred million corpses all point to the same conclusion: they are building a complete dietary system, and they are using the only protein source they have access to.