Woah… ho… Gotta love that clickbait title. I’ll cut to the chase though- more research is needed before you can get roach milk on the shelf. From the article:
“But today we have no evidence that it is actually safe for human consumption.”
“Plus roaches aren’t the easiest creatures to milk.”
Eh, there’s some things that carry a stigma. Roaches are garbage dwellers, and it’s hard to shake that, even if the ones used to make the “milk” are rigidly contained and fed.
People tend to think of insect foods as “free range”, where someone just scoops a bunch up, even though that’s far from the truth. Any of the insects used for human consumption can’t be free range because they just don’t stay that close together in the wild. You can’t farm bugs the way you can chickens, letting them roam and taking what you need.
You have to farm them in containers, feeding them with something that’s generally going to be at least as clean as chicken feed. Not necessarily because doing otherwise is gross, but because you can’t risk losing your entire stock because you let a pathogen into them via bad food practices. And that’s true even when you’re farming the bugs as pet food of fish bait.
That being said, I’d pass on roach anything. I’ve smelled roaches that were being raised as pet food. No way am I putting that in my mouth. Even crickets smell better, and they tend to be funky. Strangely, mealworms smell less, but taste worse than crickets. But the smell of roaches is bad, not just strong the way crickets are. Well, bad to me at least, that’s a subjective thing. Smell is usually a very big part of perceived taste, and nothing that bad smelling is going to taste good.
Goat cheese tastes like goats smell.
I occassionally visited someone with a goat farm. The odor around the farm was quite distinct and far from pleasant. Then when I tried goat cheese, the taste was spot-on the same as the external odor of goats. Really put me off. I cannot do goat cheese because of that. Yet goat cheese is somewhat popular so I don’t get it. I wonder if aroma is unimportant to some people.
I really like the smell of goat cheese lol. It’s a strong smell for sure, and it does have that grassy, musky funk to it.
Then again, I enjoy the smell of goats (though not goat poo). Again, it’s a potent smell, funky and animal.
But roaches smelled bad to my nose in a way that other bugs don’t. Back in the day, I kept aquariums, fished a lot, and ended up taking in some strange pets. So I was farming earthworms, crickets, meal worms, and brine shrimp. All of them have a distinct smell. But I could be out on the porch where the bugs were, and it was pleasant enough. Not so with the roaches. I was thinking about farming them for other people’s pets, but just couldn’t handle the odor (or the idea of them getting loose tbh).
I guess it’s one of those things where we’re all wired a tiny bit existent different when it comes to good/bad perceptions
I’ve lived in roach infested regions and encountered many. But never smelled them. Are you holding them up to your nose? I’m not sure I ever got closer than ~50cm from one. I wonder if you have an extra sensitive olfactory sense.
In any case, the odor could be a defense mechanism perhaps sucreted and maybe not in the milk. The smell of fish is off putting to me but I can eat a fresh prepared white fish because the odor of the meat is fine.
Roach farming, like any insect farming, keeps the bugs in containers. That keeps the smell concentrated.
I do have a fairly acute sense of smell, but at the time I was looking into roach farming, I was still smoking, so my nose was much weaker. The guy that had the “farm” could smell it though, and so could his wife and kids, which is one of the reasons why the farm was in an outbuilding of its own.
There’s kind of a “critical mass” with insect smells. Like ants, they have a strong odor if you get a few hundred together in one place, but you won’t notice it until then. Mealworms, you can smell when there’s a few dozen in a container, crickets don’t even need that many if they’re in a container for a while. Worms, like red wigglers, their smell is mostly covered up by being in soil, but if you’re switching containers for some reason, you get a double handful or so, and it starts to be detectable (it’s a kind of meaty smell, with a bit of petrichor like note).
In containers, there’s also the waste that contributes to the overall smell, though you should really be cleaning often enough it’s minor.
Afaik, the scent roaches have is a combination of pheromones and a little bit of that chitin smell that all insects have. It’s there even with perfectly clean bedding in a new container for transport, though definitely milder.
Up close, like in a container for sale, it’s barely noticeable to my nose. Faint enough that I kinda thought it might just be my imagination or some carryover. But I could still smell it later on. Never held an individual roach close to my nose, though.
Fish sauce smells disgusting but that shit is great in almost anything from tomato sauce to soup