What if I happened to somehow get locked into my microbiology lab over spring break, and i needed something to eat. Could I sustain myself by eating the agar plates? What about some enriched media such as yeast extract or blood agar? I’m just curious because i’m sure stranger things have happened.
Dunno; you might not want to eat the botulism and ebola cultures, just my thoughts.
There’s been a fair bit of research into this sort of thing IIRC; yeast and spirulina and so on; no microorganism is going to be able to manufacture food from plain water, and even with CO[sub]2[/sub] and water, green plants can only make carbohydrates and the like; in order to build proteins, other chemicals must be added, but there’s no reason why microorganisms (collectively) couldn’t provide all necesary nutrition (I’m not sure if there actually are organisms that produce every necessary nutrient though)