Actually, real life has often been much worse than TWD.
Read about the Siege of Jerusalem, and the starvation. Roving gangs went house to house looking for food. Sometimes, the starvation was so bad, their mental capacity was affected and they would go back to a house they already visited, because they couldn’t remember having raided it already.
One house, they smelled food. They found it was a mother eating her baby.
Which siege of Jerusalem? The one in 70 AD or the later ones?