Have you ever heard of cockroach oil? It is said that this was originally studied for eating! Since it was discovered that cockroaches can help humans remove kitchen waste, people's attitude towards cockroaches seems to have changed. More and more research has been done on cockroaches. The value of cockroaches has also been exploited to the extreme: when it is alive, it helps humans eat garbage for human research; when it dies, it is ground into powder to extract cockroach extract, which is used to make medicines. The famous new rehabilitation fluid is made from American cockroach extract, which can also be used to make feed for other animals.
As the favorability of cockroaches continues to rise, humans have also developed cockroach food tracks: cockroach milk, cockroach sushi, cockroach oil...
Various insect foods
Our country has always had the habit of eating bugs, and the most famous ones are Yunnan and Guangxi.
In my memory, a relative of mine is from Guangxi. When I was a child, she always brought strange foods to me, such as fried grasshoppers and crickets, and green Chaiye tofu, which is said to be made from the leaves of a certain plant.
According to her, they eat almost all kinds of bugs there, except cockroaches.
Indeed, if I go around the country, some people like to eat silkworm chrysalises, some like to eat cicada monkeys, and some even eat scorpions and centipedes, but few people eat cockroaches. Even a Guangdong gourmet who is famous for his boldness has not heard about cockroach food (water cockroaches are dragon lice).
Can't cockroaches be eaten? Actually it's not.
As early as 2018, the owner of a cockroach farm in Yibin, Sichuan, sold 10 kilograms of cockroaches to two restaurants every month. They would fry the cockroaches and sell them to customers.
According to the restaurant's response: No one ordered the fried cockroach at first. After some bold attempts, they thought it tasted pretty good, so people gradually started to eat it. Now there are many repeat customers who eat cockroach. These customers think that the fried cockroach tastes special. The key is that it is high in protein and nutritious.
When it comes to eating bugs, foreign countries are not far behind.
In the United States, insects are mainly crushed and incorporated into other foods, such as chips made from cricket flour, baked goods made from cricket flour, cricket energy bars, and grasshopper tacos;
The UK is a little more open and sells crunchy roasted crickets and mealworms in shops;
Japan is even more exaggerated and has introduced various insect sushi.
Although there are many ways to eat bugs, when it comes to eating cockroaches, they are very uniform. Cockroaches are definitely not the first choice.
What does cockroach oil smell like?
As we all know, the protein content of cockroaches is as high as 70%. If they have to eat cockroaches, I think most people will choose to fry them, or make cockroach protein bars like in "Snowpiercer".
Cockroach oil is a by-product of extracting cockroach protein.
Dr. Daylan Tzompa-Sosa of Wageningen University in the Netherlands discovered that when separating cockroach proteins, the oil in the liquid was always poured out, so he suddenly had the idea to study cockroach oil.
For comparison, the research team also studied the oils of four insects: Tenebriomolitor, Alphitobius diaperinus larvae, housecricket and Blapticadubia.
The researchers freeze-dried the bugs in liquid nitrogen, ground them into a fine powder in a blender, and extracted the oil from the fine powder.
You can take a look at the 4 types of oils in the picture, which are oils from mealworms, small mealworms, crickets and cockroaches.
At room temperature, these oils are liquid, and in terms of color, they are very close to the color of the cooking oil we eat every day. The four oils have different shades of bright yellow, which may be related to the carotenoids in the oils.
In terms of oil yield, from high to low: 12.9% for mealworms, 9.4% for small mealworms, 8% for crickets and 7.5% for cockroaches.
In terms of nutritional content, these insect oils can be said to be excellent and contain a variety of unsaturated fatty acids, including oleic acid, linoleic acid and linolenic acid that are essential for the human body. The content is also very high. The average unsaturated fatty acid content of crickets and black mealworms is as high as 64%, while that of cockroaches and yellow mealworms is as high as 75%.
In this experiment, the research team mainly wanted to verify: Can these oils be used as edible oils?
Although the research team did not personally try cooking with insect oil, they measured the odor components in the insect oil.
According to lead researcher Dr. Daylan Tzompa-Sosa, crickets and cockroaches have 20 and 19 odor molecules respectively, but their odors smell very different:
Cockroach oil contains 7 unpleasant odor molecules, which smell "particularly disgusting" and emit a "vomit-like smell" (substances such as butyric acid and propionic acid);
Cricket oil was the insect oil with the highest score in this laboratory test. It smelled of "the milky aroma of butter and cheese, mixed with vegetable and fruity aromas, and even had a whiskey-like aroma (2-nonanone has a cheesey aroma, 6-methyl-3-heptanone has an herbal aroma, and 3-methyl-1-butanol has a whiskey-like aroma)."
Overall, cockroach oil has a very bad odor and is not suitable for human consumption. It is more suitable as a paint and industrial lubricant. Cricket oil is closer to our cooking oil and is more easily accepted by people.
at last
If you ask me, would you like to eat bugs?
I can definitely answer you, no, I wouldn’t even dare to try it!
But, you ask me, do I support insect food research?
I am very supportive of that, because eating bugs can indeed solve many current problems, such as the food crisis and greenhouse gas emissions from animal husbandry.
Insect farming is a new, more environmentally friendly industry that requires low feed and land costs and produces almost no greenhouse gases. The yield is high and the protein content is high.
Take crickets, for example. The livestock industry accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet crickets are 20 times more efficient as a protein source than cattle and produce 80 times less methane than cattle.
In order to promote their products, the current strategy of many insect companies is to target people with special needs, such as those who pay great attention to nutritional value. They believe that food made from insects has high nutritional value, is environmentally friendly and sustainable, and more importantly, the price of insect food will be very cheap after mass production.
refer to:
[1].https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330714819_Four_insect_oils_as_food_ingredient_physical_and_chemical_characterisation_of_insect_oils_obtained_by_an_aqueous_oil_extraction
[2].https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2148914/cockroach-sushi-inside-farming-revolution-could-cure-cancer?campaign=2148914&module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article