# Nutritional value of microorganism culture media for humans. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 19, 2002, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nutritional-value-of-microorganism-culture-media-for-humans/119789 "2002-07-19T12:33:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![sbart6](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7ba0ec/32.png) [@sbart6](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sbart6)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2002, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nutritional-value-of-microorganism-culture-media-for-humans/119789/1 "2002-07-19T12:33:35Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2002, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nutritional-value-of-microorganism-culture-media-for-humans/119789/2 "2002-07-19T13:29:07Z")
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)