Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Cockroach milk?!?! Yep. Drink up Peasants!

I don’t want and will not drink that sh*t… But many will…

An international team of scientists sequenced a protein crystal located in the midgut of cockroaches in 2016. The reason?

It’s more than four times as nutritious as cow’s milk and the researchers think it could be the key to feeding our growing population in the future.

Although most cockroaches don’t actually produce milk, Diploptera punctate, which is the only known cockroach to give birth to live young, has been shown to pump out a type of ‘milk’ containing protein crystals to feed its babies.

The fact that an insect produces milk is pretty fascinating – but what fascinated researchers is the fact that a single one of these protein crystals contains more than three times the amount of energy found in an equivalent amount of buffalo milk (which is also higher in calories than regular cow’s milk).

Clearly milking a cockroach isn’t the most feasible option, so an international team of scientists headed by researchers from the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India decided to sequence the genes responsible for producing the milk protein crystals to see if they could somehow replicate them in the lab.

“The crystals are like a complete food – they have proteins, fats and sugars. If you look into the protein sequences, they have all the essential amino acids,” said Sanchari Banerjee, one of the team, in an interview with the Times of India back in 2016.



Not only is the milk a dense source of calories and nutrients, it’s also time released.

As the protein in the milk is digested, the crystal releases more protein at an equivalent rate to continue the digestion.

“It’s time-released food,” said Subramanian Ramaswamy, who led the project.

“If you need food that is calorifically high, that is time released and food that is complete. This is it.”

It’s important to point out that this dense protein source is definitely never going to be for those trying to lose weight, and probably isn’t even required for most western diets, where we are already eating too many calories per day.

But for those who struggle to get the amount of calories required per day, this could be a quick and easy way to get calories and nutrients.

“They’re very stable. They can be a fantastic protein supplement,” said Ramaswamy.

Now the researchers have the sequence, they are hoping to get yeast to produce the crystal in much larger quantities – making it slightly more efficient (and less gross) than extracting crystals from cockroach’s guts.

Who needs kale and quinoa when you have cockroach milk supplements?

…Yeah, we aren’t 100 percent convinced either. But if it helps alleviate the food shortages we’ll have to deal with this generation, we’ll take it.

The research was published in IUCrJ, the journal of the International Union of Crystallography.

It goes great with Oreos I bet

Look, I'm the first to say that I find the concept of insects as food loathsome. However, I find it interesting that humans produce the necessary enzyme for digesting insect protein. Without it, insects would pass through the system undigested. That means that at some point in our evolution, we relied on insects as part of our diet.

I didn’t even know they had boobs! Must be a SOB to milk em.

Look, I'm the first to say that I find the concept of insects as food loathsome. However, I find it interesting that humans produce the necessary enzyme for digesting insect protein. Without it, insects would pass through the system undigested. That means that at some point in our evolution, we relied on insects as part of our diet. Bottom line: God wanted us to eat bugs.

I also remember a teacher in Sunday School back in my days among the Presbyterians positing the idea that the manna mentioned in Exodus was some sort of insect. I looked it up; the best candidate is a scale insect that feeds on the Tamarisk tree.

What also find interesting is that 50-some years ago, they were pushing the concept of over-population down our throats and I was being told by teachers that some day we were all going to have to eat bugs, because we would be running out of arable land for crops. The over-population scare has since gone bust. Humans are going to peak out at some time in the near future and the world population is going to decline. This has to do with industrialization; when you get fat and happy, you tend to spawn less.

Still, there are guys like Bill Gates pushing this over-population narrative, and along with it, the idea of eating insects instead of beef. I don't buy any of it.

Shaman, that is all well and good for US and Europe which have had negative population growth for fifty years. If we could just get those "less civilized" nations on board.

But Mexico, Africa, and the Middle East keep breeding like rabbits. And we are expected to house and feed the overflow.