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 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
Fish sauce smells disgusting but that shit is great in almost anything from tomato sauce to soup