Are hydrogen-hungry microbes everything the body needs?

This post is part of "Boldly Growing," a Science of Fiction series about the future of food production and gastronomy. Check out the rest here.

If you remember anything about what humans eat in the 1999 film The Matrix, you probably remember feeling a bit grossed out. Most people in this dystopian, cyberpunk future live out their lives in a dream-like state, their minds trapped in a computer simulation of the late 1990s while their bodies float inside stasis pods, intravenously consuming the liquified remains of other humans. Those who have managed to escape the Matrix live in a sunless underground city where the only thing on the menu is a gruel-like slop made from a single-celled organism that produces "everything the body needs" — nutritionally, if not psychologically.

Obviously, I'd take microbial gruel over the rendered tallow of my fellow pod-mates, even if the Matrix can trick my mind into thinking the latter tastes like a delicious steak. But has anyone paused to consider why the people of Zion tolerate Siberian gulag fare day in, day out? It's great that nobody seems to be getting scurvy in this subterranean utopia, but are we to accept that humanity's most creative minds — people who managed to wake themselves up from an AI-run simulation that billions of others unblinkingly accept as reality — are powerless to make their nutrient-rich bacterial slop more appetizing?

That seems unlikely. Especially when you consider that there's a Finnish company working to perfect single-celled protein gastronomy right now.