Scientists Are Saying That Cockroach Milk Just Might Be the Superfood of the Future but It’ll Be A Long Time Before Cockroach Horchata
The future of nutrition is evolving. The next big superfood that could change the world is cockroach milk. That’s right. You read that correctly. Cow milk is going to be so yesterday, maybe. The female Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera functata, is the maker of this surprising, nutrient-dense elixir.
Scientists have confirmed that cockroach milk is a very nutritious substance
The Pacific beetle cockroach is native to Hawaii and is unlike most other cockroaches in the world. The female Pacific cockroach gives live birth to its young. This unusual characteristic made scientists curious so they looked into how the cockroach fed its young. That is when they discovered that it can produce a nutrient-rich milk that can be consumed as a liquid or crystals.
“I discovered that these little embryos at a certain development were able to drink,” Barbara Stay, a professor emerita at the University of Iowa who first studied the insect’s milk, told NPR. “What they were drinking was a liquid substance.”
Now, the milk isn’t easy to extract, as you might expect. However, research shows that the milk produced by the Pacific beetle cockroach is three times more nutritious than cow’s milk. It has also been proven to be more nutritious than buffalo milk, previously the most nutritious milk on the planet.
Cockroach milk won’t be in stores anytime soon
The nutritional value of the cockroach milk is still being examined by scientists in different parts of the world. There is also no evidence that the cockroach milk is safe for human consumption yet but that is being studied.
The sheer volume of cockroaches needed to truly make enough of the milk to scale is daunting. According to The MIT Press Reader, extracting the milk is time-consuming and inefficient. In order to get the product, the insects have to be killed, meaning that milking cockroaches is a one-time thing. There is also a short window where the cockroach can be “milked.”
According to Healthline, there are several downsides to the future milk alternative. Aside from the slaughter of thousands of cockroaches for a glass of milk, the caloric value is high. According to the article, one glass of cockroach milk will have three times the calories as cow’s milk. Essentially, a glass of cockroach milk will have 700 calories, which would cause significant weight gain.
Bugs have long been considered the superfood of the future
Insects have been a staple in cuisines across the world. Chapulines in Mexico. Tarantulas in Cambodia. The concept of eating insects is not new and has a history around the world. It is the Western world, specifically the northern hemisphere, where the idea faces pushback.
According to The Guardian, the future of food is with insects. It promises to be good for people, good for the environment, and good for animals. Shifting to a more insect-focused diet on a global level offers less strain on our resources, brought to the brink by humans exploiting our natural resources.
Whether or not we are all going to enjoy cockroach milk lattes is still very much unlikely. However, the more scientists look into how we mitigate the damage of manmade climate change, insects keep coming up as a safe food source.
