Ologies with Alie Ward
Bonus Episode: COCKROACH MILK with Joshua Benoit and Sinead English
20 Oct 2025
Full Episode
Oh, hey, it's the convo you're overhearing at a cafe, and this is Ologies. I'm Allie Ward. I'm so proud of you. Here you are, maybe after this week's main episode, to hear a bonus episode about cockroach milk, about which I'm actually very passionate. So let me set the stage. So for a few years, The Tonight Show was asking if I'd want to do a bug segment for them, and I kept chickening out.
And then in May of this year... I went on the show. I showed Salma Hayek some beetle larva and scorpions and this bird-eating tarantula. I put a cat-eye praying mantis on Jimmy Fallon's face.
I'm not looking.
No, there you go. She wants to go to me. She wants to go to you. We can put one on you.
Oh, yeah, okay. Did you see? Very... Confident about this. Oh, yeah. Look at you, Sama. Sama, I... Like her. Yeah, you made a new friend. This is nice.
We'll link the segment in the show notes. But what you did not see was me eating the milk of a cockroach. This is because of fate and... But it's also because of a guy on set known as Safety Steve. And last minute, my little vials of frozen cockroach milk were given like this tragic kibosh after months and months of working with a lab to milk cockroaches. I am getting ahead of myself because...
What do you mean cockroaches make milk? I'm sure you are wondering that. We're going to dive into a vat of it in a minute. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone out there in Ologies Merch from ologiesmerch.com.
And thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which I earnestly read and they help us so much. And to prove it, I read one recent one, like this one from Paragrindis, who left a review saying, everything in the whole wide world is riveting. Soul saving for our times. Thank you, Para Grindis. I don't know how to say your name, but I like your review. Also, hey, Fiona.
So let's get into this episode. So in 2017, I saw an article about cockroach milk in the news. It was all over the news. One NPR piece proclaimed it the most nutritious substance on earth, three times that of buffalo milk. And I have thought about this substance forever. like roughly daily ever since. And I have told anyone who will listen about it now, including you.
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