Allie Ward

People eat bugs.

Arguably, we should be eating more bugs, fewer mammals, fewer animals.

We have a whole entomophagy anthropology episode all about it.

And you may find yourself, after listening, ordering some cricket flour.

Just so you know, I had two wedding cakes and one had cricket flour in it, courtesy of the wonderful Lepidopterology butterfly guest, Phil Torres, and his wonderful chef wife, Celia Torres.

who I also talked about in the porcupine episode.

But if you have a shellfish allergy, be careful with eating ground-up cockroaches or bugs.

So let's say, like me, you'd want to dip a pastry into just a smidge, a few milliliters of carefully harvested cockroach milk.

Well, first, you have to email a bunch of researchers and you have to beg them to spare some, which is nearly impossible.

And how is the milk obtained?

When you're milking a cockroach, it doesn't have little nipples on the outside.

Who says it doesn't have little nipples?

That sounds pretty nipply to me.

I know right now you are thinking, Allie, you have done the unimaginable.

You have obtained a few precious milliliters of cockroach milk, which only a handful of people on earth have ever held in their hands.

Yes, I did.

And it was worth making a donation to Josh's lab.

Hey, a heroic researcher named Gabrielle Lefebvre to do this milking.

And I haven't fully crunched the numbers, but I suspect that this cockroach substance might be worth its actual weight in gold.

But the day before the Tonight Show taping, this May...