Many people have their breakfast with a glass of milk. Right now, cows, buffalos, goats and sheep provide most of the world’s milk. But soon, people could get milk from roaches (蟑螂).

That isn’t as crazy as it might sound. New research shows this “milk” is super-nutritious. What’s more, some scientists have already found milk from a lot of insects.

In 2004, Subra Rama started studying milk crystals found inside the roach. At the time, he was teaching biochemistry at the University of Iowa City.

To learn more about the milk crystal from roaches, the scientists used X-rays to look at the atoms in it. The data revealed the chemical secret of the roach crystal. They showed that roach milk is a “complete food”. It contains sugar with a fatty acid stuck to it. Fatty acids are the building blocks of fats. The protein in the milk is also full of essential amino (氨基的) acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Since our bodies can’t produce the “essential” ones, we need to get them from our food. And so do baby roaches.

Barbara Stay, a biologist at Iowa University, also worked on the new study. She says the new data show that the roach milk is “three times more nutritious than cow’s milk and four times more nutritious than buffalo’s milk”.

Rama would like to see roach milk turned into a protein supplement to feed hungry people. But not everyone is confident that it can be done.

Marcel Dicke studies insects as a potential source of human food at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Dicke says this is a “sound study”. However, in his opinion, “Extracting (提取) milk from roaches can only likely be done in a destructive way with only small quantities”. That means you’d have to raise and kill many bugs to get very little milk.

Your Food Choices Affect the Earth’s Climate

Every action has a cost, even for growing food and delivering it to your dinner plate. A team of researchers has found that meat production releases more climate-warming pollution than it does when producing fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. Their calculations suggest that people could do a lot to slow global warming if they limited how much meat they eat.

There are plenty of “costs” of food. As to the visible costs, people pay money for the food as well as the fuel needed to get groceries to the store or restaurant. However, producing foods also takes resources，for example，the water used to irritate (灌溉）crop fields or the fertilizer and chemicals used to promote plant growth and fight pests.

Peter Scarborough at the University of Oxford in England decided to calculate some of the less-visible pollution created by food production. His team focused on greenhouse gases emitted through the production of our food, including carbon dioxide(CO2)，methane(甲烷） and the nitrous oxide. All three gases are important. While CO2 is the greenhouse gas released in the highest volume, methane and nitrous oxide stay in the atmosphere far longer than CO2 does. As such, they are more powerful in warm the earth’s atmosphere.

They used a computer to change the methane and nitrous-oxide emissions for each person’s diet into its carbon dioxide “equivalent.”That’s the amount of CO2 needed to warm Earth’s atmosphere by the same amount as the methane or nitrous oxide would.

As for the calculations of the carbon dioxide “equivalent(等量)”, in the 1990s, a survey asked65,000 adults what they typically had eaten throughout the past year. Scarborough’s team fed those data into a computer and then included the amount of green house gases linked with producing nearly100 common foods. Then the computer matched those green house-gas amounts to the mix of foods each person had reported eating.

It shows that the diet of someone whose meals included an average of 50 to 99 grams of meat each day would be responsible for the daily release of 5.6 kilograms of CO2 equivalent while those vegans had the lowest diet-linked greenhouse-gas emissions (2.9 kg of CO2 equivalent).

Its authors conclude that reducing the intake of meat and other animal-based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change reduction. And compared to meat, more plant-based food calories can be grown on more lands with less water and other resources. In places where many people are going hungry, raising meat may make it harder to ensure that everyone gets enough to eat.

Why bother cooking? You don’t have time, of course (or you think you don’t); that’s the big reason. But you also don’t do it as well as the professionals, so just let them handle it for you. Or at least let them give you a head start in the form of meal-assembly shops(食品组装店)and canned, frozen and pre-chopped ingredients. Michael Pollan thinks you should bother. His latest book, Cooked, is a powerful argument for a return to home cooking.

Scores of food writers and editors, myself included, have long mourned for the increase of companies on the public’s diet. We have seen the slow retreat(撤退)from the kitchen as primary contributor to America’s obesity and other health and environmental problems. But perhaps only Pollan can so effectively pick up the clues of so many food movements, philosophies and research papers and turn them into a persuasive narrative with a clear message. He writes, “The best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in our lives is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.”

Don’t challenge him. Because of the power of his writing, Cooked may prove to be just as influential as Pollan’s other book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, possibly the single most-quoted text by those caring about how our eating choices affect the planet.

As in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan knows that his reliability depends on a willingness to practice what he urges, so in Cooked he takes just as much of a hands-on approach as he suggests his readers do. He divides the book into four sections: in this case, the classical elements of fire, water, air and earth. Each represents a type of cooking—barbecue, braising(炖), bread baking and fermentation—and, as the book’s subtitle promises, explores cooking as no less than a transformation of nature into food and drink.