Don’t bug out, but in the future the milk you drink could come from a cockroach! Scientists say Hawaii’s Pacific beetle cockroach produces milk for its young that is so nutritious, it could be a superfood for people.
Ramaswamy Subramanian, a professor at Purdue University in Indiana, researched the yellow substance. He found that it contains sugars and fats, just like milk produced by mammals. But the roach version provides a lot more energy. It gives three times as much as buffalo milk, previously thought to be the world’s most nutritious type.
You don’t need to start mentally preparing for roach milk smoothies yet, though. Collecting just 6 tablespoons of the liquid takes a month and 1,000 cockroaches.
Subramanian is trying to figure out faster ways to produce it. He has experimented with putting the roach gene for making milk into yeast, tiny organisms that reproduce quickly. It took colonies of yeast two days to make the same amount of milk as 1,000 roaches.
Getting Americans to drink the milk could be a hard sell. But people elsewhere don’t have as much distaste for bugs, Subramanian says. “There’s not a yuck factor in many countries to eat insects,” he explains, “so there’s not a problem to [drink] this.”
—Katie Free