It’s the apocalypse and I’m stuck in this mail room with nothing but 60 tons of white computer paper to eat.
How long would I survive on an all-paper diet?
Not long at all. Paper has effectively zero nutritional value. It is mostly cellulose, which, although a carbohydrate, is indigestible for humans. You might get a tiny amount of usable sugar released from it by gut bacteria, but nothing significant. You will be getting no vitamins and no protein from it. Very likely it will also contain toxic chemicals, such as bleaching agents or white pigments.
You will starve to death about as quickly as you would eating nothing at all; maybe quicker as you will shit a lot and that might waste substances you would be better off hanging on to.
I am assuming you have adequate water. If not, you will die of thirst anyway well before you starve.
Of course I have adequate water. Every mail room has at least one water cooler, right?
So … feed it to the cow you keep in the break room, and drink the milk.
Better than a cow: Cultivate a colony of termites, which have gut bacteria that can digest cellulose. Eat the termites.
Win!
Never considered termites.
I would think that unless you deliberately drink MORE than the usual amount of water, ingestion of only paper would pose the threat of impaction somewhere along the digestive tract.
~VOW
You shouldn’t eat the paper. I am SURE I used to hear a lot of stuff about a paperless orifice.
Or something like that.
Most paperless offices subscribe to the “scan once, print twice” school of thought 
You wil die. Unlike a cow, your stomach cannot break down cellulose.
Wasn’t there a proposal to feed recycled newsprint to cows?
So, can cattle actually eat newsprint with no ill effects, then? Surely there would be a few (or a lot) of chemical things to get rid of first? :dubious:
Would it help to eat, throw it up and rechew and eat it again, trying to duplicate what a cow does?
You mean like a paper jam?
That would be fine, wouldn’t? Given that the law is:
then CheeseDonkey would not suffer a paper jam. Might get very **very **hungry though.
Has m’learned friend **CheeseDonkey ** considered a bit of auto-cannibalism? I mean, all that cheese available, and that’s even before you feel a need to kill the donkey.
Just give up and die already!
Very tasty with peanut butter.
Or boil the paper to sterilise it, then stack it and use as a growth medium for saprophytic fungi such as oyster or shiitake mushrooms
Taking this silly thread back to it’s GQ origins, sorry:
I occasionally see cellulase supplements on the shelves of health food stores and such. Say you had a huge supply of those as well, would that help?
I don’t think so. Cellulase turns cellulose into cellobiose, which also is not digestible by humans.