Yum! Hawaii’s Pacific beetle cockroach feeds milk to its young that’s so nutritious it could be a superfood for people, scientists say. The milk tastes sweet and contains sugars and fats, just like milk produced by mammals. It provides many more nutrients, though—even more than that of buffalo milk, previously thought to be the world’s most nutritious.
However, we’re a long way from roach milk smoothies, says Ramaswamy Subramanian, a professor at Purdue University in Indiana. Collecting just 6 tablespoons of roach milk takes a month and 1,000 cockroaches. So instead, Subramanian has experimented with putting the roach gene for making milk into yeast. So far, it seems to be working: It took colonies of yeast two days to make the same amount of milk as 1,000 roaches.
Getting Americans to consume the milk could be a hard sell, as they tend to have an aversion to bugs. Elsewhere, it might prove popular. “There’s not a yuck factor in many countries to eat insects,” Subramanian says, “so there’s not a problem to [drink] this.”