Can you make arbitrary food out of yeast?

In his Robot Series, Isaac Asimov mentions "yeast substitutes" as a way of creating enough food to feed everybody in the Cities. It's also mentioned in Prelude to Foundation. Here's a few quotes from The Caves of Steel:

• City culture meant optimum distribution of food, increasing utilization of yeasts and hydroponics.

• A fork and two slices of whole yeast bread appeared[...]

• Human beings had grown used to yeast substitutes, but animals, more conservative in their way, insisted on real grain.

• [...] yeast-nut cake and a rather extravagant slice of fried chicken on cracker

• Uncle Boris always had a little supply of yeast delectables: small cookies, chocolaty things filled with sweet liquid[...].

• Beginning with the mountains of wood and coarse cellulose that were dragged into the City from the tangled forests of the Alleghenies, through the vats of acid that hydrolyzed it to glucose, the carloads of niter and phosphate rock that were the most important additives, down to the jars of organics supplied by the chemical laboratories"”it all came to only one thing, yeast and more yeast.

• "When New Yorkers started getting strawberries out of season a couple of years back, those weren't strawberries, fella. Those were a special high-sugar yeast culture with true-bred color and just a dash of flavor additive."

My knowledge of yeast is pretty basic: you put it in dough to make bread rise and you put it in water to make beer. I understand there are also other uses for it, but I've never heard of "whole yeast bread", "yeast delectables" or "those weren't strawberries, fella."

There's even zymoveal and protoveg, which, I would guess, are meat and vegetable substitutes made from yeast:

As it is, zymoveal and protoveg are very good. They're wellbalanced nourishment with no waste and, as a matter of fact, they're full of vitamins and minerals and everything anyone needs[...]

Is this realistic or is it something Asimov invented?

posted about 8 years ago

isanae‭

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