Please forgive the almost-off-topic question, but I've been curious for years and can never find a straight answer. Is there no microbe out there that will ferment sugar/starch into methanol? I once found a paper on methanol poisonings in the developing world which didn't seem deliberate, and the authors suggested there were some opportunistic yeast that might be the culprit.

High energy chemistry to make methanol just seems to almost miss the point.