'poured plates' - is that putting agar in petri dishes? awesome about no lead, thanks for investigating!
Yeah, it's a little pre-packaged kit that comes with an empty
Petri dish, and a small bottle of medium that you pour into it and let
solidify. No heating required, so they may be using some
air-activated reaction to get the gel to set, or possibly some coating
in the seemingly empty Petri dish (possibly alginate + CaCl2?)
We could easily have made our own plates, but I wanted to try these kits out anyway, and you can send the results in for identification.