Cockroach farms in China | Hacker News Reader

Cockroach farms in China

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38 pointswallflower51 comments

> .. " kill 6 tonnes (6.6 short tons) of cockroaches at a time with heat and extracts the essence from them."

Essence? What the hell is a cockroach essence?

> “The effectiveness of cockroaches has been tested by the bodies of our ancestors and proven by lab experiments,” Geng said.

What lab experiments? Which ancestors?

> Geng said kangfuxin ye, made entirely from cockroaches, can cure oral and peptic ulcers, skin burns and wounds, and even prevent stomach cancer.

I really hope people don't take this as a preventative measure for stomach cancer.

All of that within a few paragraphs, the amount of bullshit in this article is incredible. While I'm sure mashed up roach guts is probably not the worst thing for you, the claims in this article are unsubstantiated and just don't make any sense.

They call it a "healing potion" in the article. My first response was also "Wow I can't believe they're creating a ton of cockroaches and playing with them to create this snake oil medicine" but it appears somewhat legit?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27375766

Although maybe those studies are just fudged data by Big Cockroach. Or maybe these studies are in the same vein as the studies that spawn clickbait like "red wine is good for your heart, you don't need to exercise you can just drink!"

> red wine is good for your heart, you don't need to exercise you can just drink

lalalalala I can't hear you

If whiskey counted toward this, I'd have the heart of an athlete.

Instead I have the knee injuries of one.

"Traditional medicine" aka not medicine.

Is it all that different than the junk pitched regularly in the west? Homeopathic "remedies" for children are sold at my local wholefoods. At least the powered roach essence probably has more nutritional value than water.

I mean I get your point, but just because there's other snake oil salesmen doesn't make the practice any less wrong.

> Essence? What the hell is a cockroach essence?

Makes me think of La Croix sparkling water because all their drinks have fruit "essence" [1] in them. > Essence is created by heating items such as fruit and vegetable skins, rinds, and remnants at high temperatures, producing vapors. These vapors are condensed and then sold by the barrel.

I wonder if it's a similar process?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/la-croix-mystery-ingredient-n...

I could see cockroaches as a food source for farm animals maybe, but I have my doubts about roaches ever making the mainstream western diet. If it costs less, and is more environmentally friendl, to produce a pound of roaches than it does a pound of corn, why not turn it into pig food?

The cycle in the article is kitchen waste => cockroach => cockroach flour as chicken feed => chicken => kitchen

Seems reasonable. Or maybe I should just go vegan at this point...

Well seems like you are already vegan seeing as you stock your kitchen full of chicken feed.

It's made of cockroaches.

We supplement our dogs raw diet with grasshopper flour.[1] I chose that along with eggs as a more humane source of protein.

I've eaten bugs in Thailand(they were actually quite tasty), but I haven't had the urge to try this flour yet.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cricket-powder-made-100-22/dp/B00OMCT...

Shrimp and roaches are pretty much the same thing..one lives in the ocean, the other on land...

Honest question: how so?

I am fairly sure I am not alone in a severe and visceral aversion to roaches whereas shrimp excite no such sentiment. I have always wondered why that is - it seems so irrational. Also, roaches have some capabilities that make them somewhat special [1] - let's hope the super-size trend that applies to other farmed products does not make its way to this creature.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141021-the-fastest-insect-i...

Few people turn on the kitchen light and see dozens of shrimp scurry away under the kitchen cabinets.

If I thought shrimp was crawling all of my food, I might be more adverse to shrimp. Instead, I've only seen shrimp as food.

Plus many people have never seen live or even raw shrimp - their only exposure is the tasty red shrimp body on their plate (or freezer bag), not the pale grey translucent body with many legs, big eyes and antenna. They are certainly a lot less appetizing in their natural state.

I've heard people refer to diving for lobsters in South Florida as diving for "bugs". It kind of makes you think of them differently.

Interesting fact - "Lobster was also commonly served in prisons, much to the displeasure of inmates. American lobster was initially deemed worthy only of being used as fertilizer or fish bait, and until well into the 20th century, it was not viewed as more than a low-priced canned staple food."

Perception is key.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster

I read that a big part of this sentiment was because it was all ground up, shell, guts, and all, when served.

It's not an accident. Roaches carry diseases that infect humans. They feed on human faeces when they get access to sewage, and they often do. Shrimps are bottom feeders too, but while I'm not an expert, I believe that the great difference of the pathogens common at sea and those found in land is the reason we're not very disgusted of shrimps.

Personally I'm also not very disgusted by those meaty worms that people in Africa and the Amazon eat. They don't look appetizing, but also not very disgusting. Maybe it's an accident or cultural bias, but I strongly believe that cockroaches and similar incests are disgusting because we're hardcoded to find them disgusting. I'm sure even kids do, before any influence.

They aren't even close, shrimp have actual soft flesh and tissue. The only characteristic I can really see them sharing is they have an exoskeleton.

Shrimp don't fly around and chase you either.

Or skip the pigs and the roaches and everyone eat lentils and beans and grains and all those other delicious plants. Save the planet and our health (not to mention billions of animals), yeehaw!

As happy as I am to save the planet, the alternative to "we breed 90% of the animals on earth for food" is not "now all those animals are free".

I'm not sure what your point is? I'm going to assume you meant that I thought we could literally set all the current livestock in the world free, which is not what I meant. Rather, we would just stop breeding them in the first place as the demand would go down.

Are people so averse to things like lentils and beans as soures of protein that they'd rather eat roaches? What a strange world we live in.

I don't see the connection that brought that up? Lentils are an incomplete source of protein, unlike animal proteins. They don't even have similar ratios of macro nutrients. It's a complete non-sequitur.

I made a perfectly logical connection, thank you. It's easy to get all the required proteins from plant sources - lentils, beans etc. That was my point.

Why, because they are both food? Lentils and almost all plant proteins are not complete proteins.

Then eat the lentils or beans with some rice and BAM! You got yourself some of that complete protein you seem to be obsessed with. Plenty of other plant based complete proteins too - soy beans, quinoa for example. Live the dream my friend.

If you're looking at rice as a protein source IMO you're looking in the wrong place. It's almost completely a carbohydrate. That's like eating a slice of bread 'for the protein'.

So now that we've begun factory farming cockroaches, how long until a cockroach-pox emerges?

The plus side of this is that while cows and pigs are evolutionarily quite close to humans, and chickens are still fairly close, cockroaches are radically different biologically. (e.g. cowpox causes sores in the cow's skin, and in your skin, whereas cockroaches don't even have skin.) The most plausible way for humans to be affected would be for some parasite to have a lifecycle that involves both cockroaches and humans.

Imagine you caught a horrible disease that weakened your leg spines, or made your antennae fall off, or reduced the efficiency of your haemolymph in binding oxygen to copper. How much would you care about any of that?

Yersinia pestis (aka the plague) comes to mind. Its lifecycle involves fleas and mammals. The twist is also the way it interacts with the flea blocks flea's digestive tract, which makes the flea be permanently hungry and bite so much more to try to feed itself. Which also spreads the infection, of course. So the disease can be harmful for both insects and mammals despite different biology.

>> The most plausible way for humans to be affected would be for some parasite to have a lifecycle that involves both cockroaches and humans.

So the plague is a disease that arose in mammals and infects humans, with fleas as an (affected) vector.

The threat of disease from farmed animals is generally that the large population of animals and close contact between them and the farmers allows diseases of that animal to transfer into the human population. This is extremely implausible for cockroaches.

It would be easier for a disease/parasite to use humans as a cockroach-to-cockroach vector than to directly infect the humans -- as you describe in reverse for plague -- but I don't see that farming cockroaches increases that threat in a manner comparable to how farming pigs dramatically increases the threat of the existence of pig diseases (since there are more pigs). The cockroaches on a farm have extensive direct contact with each other; there won't be much percentage in spreading through a human.

>>Milk can be made from the Diploptera punctata cockroach, the only variant of cockroach known to give birth rather than lay eggs. It is found mostly on Pacific islands.

Wow, I did not know that.

Strange but true[1] it seems. It is peculiar enough for an insect to give birth to live young, but making milk is even more bizarre.

1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1525-142X....

Between the cupboard layers are millions of roaming cockroaches – the species Periplaneta americana, the Latin name of the American cockroach.

I wonder why they didn't use an Asian variety? The ones I've seen over there were much more vigorous, robust, and meaty than the ones I've seen here. Perhaps they just don't have that special ulcer-fighting ingredient...

I love the moat full of carp, to prevent environmental damage. Hopefully there is a drawbridge, otherwise the roaches will totally figure out how to bypass it.

Well cockroaches fly, so there's that.

It seems that's not their first option, though? I lived over the boiler room as a freshman in college, and they came looking for warmth on a regular basis. My roommate and I would sit around in our underwear with the windows open. (Like I said, it was hot. Probably not the case anywhere else in Boston in the winter!) We got to the point we could squash the bastards from afar by tossing textbooks like frisbees. Not one roach ever took to the air to avoid his fate...

Now I'm really wondering. In what circumstances does a cockroach fly?

"Palmetto Bugs" tend to take flight a lot...

I think.

Definitely some roach in Florida flies a lot, which has a habit of freaking transplants out, but I just checked the internet and it implies they don't fly much. So maybe it's American cockroaches that fly and the German Cockroach (the stereo typical roach) that doesn't...

Not all cockroaches fly. It's likely you had the wrong type (or thr right one, if you don't love roaches flying into you).

One of my greatest fears is roaches. I can't even look at a Papa Roach album cover without recoiling in disgust and fear. Regardless of whether it's made into a form similar to chicken nuggets, just knowing it's made of roaches will probably be enough for me to never eat the stuff. Maybe there's a business opportunity in hypno-therapy to get over this kind of roach fear. I can't be the only one.

Huh, this conjures up ton of interesting questions and ideas. Cockroaches seem so resilient compared to most animals and plants. Would lucrative cockroach farms still need to use antibiotics to increase yield?

If you do need antibiotics, in the "horrible" case that this causes the evolution of an anti-cockroach super bug can I get some for my kitchen? You've solved a bigger problem.

Another week, another example of people doing something dumb on the basis of medical superstition...

> “Based on our current rate of expansion, it will take only three to four years for us to process all the kitchen waste in China,” Li said.

>Cockroaches can cure cancer

sounds like pesudoscience. where's the evidence backing this up?

>“The effectiveness of cockroaches has been tested by the bodies of our ancestors and proven by lab experiments,” Geng said. [...] Researchers at the firm have published dozens of articles about its product in both Chinese and English-language medical journals. [...] Geng, Gooddoctor’s chairman, hopes that multiple-substance drugs – such as those used in traditional Chinese medicine – will one day be recognised by the international science community.

makes me think the papers they wrote weren't published in any serious publications.

>But despite its kangfuxin ye potion having proven effective in treating ulcers and skin wounds, the company has been unable to fulfil modern Western medicine’s requirement to isolate a single active chemical substance from cockroaches, for use in drug manufacturing.

AFAIK all you need to do to get a drug approved by the FDA is to demonstrate it's safe and effective. I seriously doubt isolating the drug to a single substance is a requirement of "Western medicine".

I'm sympathetic to your skepticism of claims like "X can cure cancer," especially when they can be interpreted as folk remedies unproven by the scientific method.

Having said that, the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine was a Chinese doctor who re-discovered a traditional cure for malaria.[0] While this is obviously only a single example, it goes to show that, in recent memory, there was at least one time a significant medical advancement came from traditional Chinese medicine.

0. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-34451386

There are a lot of medicines derived from plants - are there any proven medicines that are derived from animal products (minus things that are directly body-things like insulin)?

Burn it all

Please don't do this here.

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