Scientists are hard at work brewing up the next superfood: Cockroach milk.
The nutritious bug juice is packed with protein and calories, making it a potential perfect weapon against world hunger — and just the right addition to your next latte, researchers said.
A recent scientific review published in the journal “Insects” explores how the latest advances in cockroach milk and other insect-derived ingredients can be used for “functional beverages” such as protein shakes, tea, liquor and beer and be sold in mainstream markets.
It’s unclear what the milk tastes like — or whether anyone has ever tried it.
But it is produced by the Pacific beetle cockroach to feed its unborn babies and loaded with special crystalized proteins and has triple the calories of bovine milk, according to Dr. Ramaswamy Subramanian of Purdue University, who co-authored a groundbreaking cockroach-milk study in 2016.
Subramanian and his colleagues — Leonard Chavas from the medical imaging company DECTRIS and Nathan Coussens of the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research — studied how the milk, or “milk analogue,” to be precise, could be harvested in mass to supplement global food supplies.
And why not bring it to neighborhood coffee shops in the meantime?
“[T]his work shows that insect-based beverages are likely to move beyond niche markets” with the proper marketing, wrote to the study’s authors, who also explored how ingredients from worms, crickets, and other creepy-crawlies can go mainstream, too.
But harvesting cockroach milk is harder than it sounds.
The Pacific beetle cockroach is the only known cockroach that has live births.
For their research, Subramanian and his colleagues cut embryos out of 54-day pregnant Pacific roaches, sliced the embryos open and allowed their protein crystals — i.e., the “milk” — to spill out.
The scientists are now studying the molecular structure of the roach baby food in hopes of replicating it.
Subramanian co-authored another cockroach milk study in 2023, and this year he and his colleagues won the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry — an award given for scientific achievements that “make people laugh and then think,” Purdue said in an announcement.
“I’m delighted to receive an Ig Nobel Prize because it recognizes something I’ve always believed about science: The most unexpected questions can lead to fascinating discoveries,” Subramanian said, in an acceptance statement.
