China produces sushi and meat from farms of billions of cockroaches

With dozens of cockroach farms with scale of billions, cockroaches are processed by Chinese people into many dishes.

According to the morning of the South China Post, hundreds of farmers across China are unleashing the potential of cockroaches in many different areas such as food, the environment, .

One in Shandong province in eastern China, about 3 billion cockroaches consume up to 15 tons of kitchen waste every day. With a huge number of cockroaches, they help solve long-term environmental problems by helping 'clean' the leftover food mountain.

A large-scale cockroach farm in China.

And when restaurants selling dishes made from cockroaches appear all over China, maybe in the future, cockroaches will become a solution to human food shortages.

Therefore, people also need to be more open to this seemingly obnoxious insect, and thereby motivate us to have new ideas, embark on new markets: the market of cockroaches .

Superior environmental protection measures

In the Shandong region, hundreds of farmers are raising cockroaches and selling larvae to a few larger companies to engage in drug manufacturing businesses or decompose kitchen waste.

Their pioneer is Li Yanrong, founder of Qiaobin Agricultural Technology Company, based in Jiangzhou City. Every day, Mr. Li's 3 billion cockroaches eat up to 15 tons of kitchen waste that the city emits.

According to Mr. Li, because cockroaches can eat anything, they can consume up to 5% of their body weight every day, so cockroaches are an effective tool to handle city kitchen waste.

Give waste to eat waste.

"Cockroaches have eaten plants and organic matter hundreds of millions of years ago, so they are waste disposal experts" - Mr. Li said.

Composting with cockroaches is a way of protecting the environment in excess of the traditional methods such as burial or burning, because it does not create groundwater, greenhouse gas pollution or disputes between unused landfill residents. close.

"There is no better way to handle kitchen waste than to eat it," Li said.

From making chicken food .

Besides raising cockroaches with kitchen waste, Li also discovered another way to trade from cockroaches. After the cockroaches died, Mr. Li crushed the cockroaches into high protein powder, turning it into chicken feed.

Because there are more than 60% of protein in cockroaches, far beyond 20-30% of beef and chicken. This powder not only makes chickens full of belly, but it can also help chickens lose fat, increase their immunity.

Then crush them into chicken food.

. come to be human food

Many people have considered the possibility that cockroaches provide food for humans. Restaurants sold cockroach dishes in provinces like Shandong, Sichuan and Yunnan.

Cockroaches, light yellow and soft, are often fried or stir-fried and seasoned with spices and salt. Although no company or commercial joint venture produces food made from large-scale cockroaches, according to Mr. Li, that will soon happen.

People began to study the use of milk from Diploptera punctate cockroaches - the only cockroach that gave birth instead of laying eggs, living mainly on the Pacific islands. Cockroaches are believed to contain three times more energy than cow's milk - although researchers added that they have no evidence that cockroaches are safe for humans.

In addition, in 2013, the World Food and Agriculture Organization published a study showing that to solve food shortages, people began to eat insects.

Or turn cockroaches into delicious dishes for people like sushi, roasted, fried, fried, .

Similar ideas inspired Li Bingcai, a cockroach farmer in rural Yibin city of Sichuan province, who joined the business only two years ago.

"I plan to produce food products like cockroach meat and cockroach for two years." Li said, doing so, currently, Li sells 10kg of cockroaches / month to a local restaurant to make it into a dish.

"At first everyone was scared, disgusted with food from cockroaches, but now many people are used to it, and even like to eat them , " Li said . "Cockroaches have a special flavor and are full of greasy proteins".

In order to gain community approval to bring cockroaches into food, pets or even medicine in China, business people in this industry have to work for a long time, and the way that's not over yet.

Close-up of cockroach sushi of Chinese people.

However, pioneers in the cockroach industry believe that they will succeed in creating markets for cockroaches products.