Photo via Flickr user mikefats
Even White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders might struggle to put a positive spin on cockroachesāor, at the very least, sheād claim, āNo, they really werenāt lurking under the bed in your first apartment, waiting until you slept to drag their leathery bodies across your lips.ā (But oh, they were.) There are very few charming characteristics about these nightmarish insects, but a former pharmaceutical exec in China seems to have turned their ability to eat garbage into a viable way to process food waste.Li Yanrong left his corporate job three years ago, and opened a facility that now houses more than 300 million American cockroaches, which you can find by typing āFUCK NOā into Google Maps. (Itās actually in Jinan, in the Henan province of China). The creepy little residents of his cockroach farm are capable of consuming 15 tons of food waste every day, which is roughly 25 percent of all of the waste that is left behind by all the kitchens in the district.āThese cockroaches are not afraid of anything soft, hard, sour, sweet, bitter, or spicy,ā Li said, according to the South China Morning Post. He praises the cockroachesā ability to get rid of our collective leftovers without further polluting the environment, and hopes to eventually house 4,000 tons of cockroaches (8 MILLION POUNDS), which would be able to eat their way through 200 tons of food waste every day.Restaurants in the province deliver their scraps directly to Liās facility, where it is ground and piped in for the hungry roaches to eat. And, because the circle of life can be weirder than The Lion King led you to believe, when these roaches die, their bodies will be powdered and used as extra protein for animal feed.The SCMP reports that cockroach farms like Liās are not unfamiliar in China, because Periplaneta americana are used in a number of Chinese medicine and health products. A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald recently visited a farm operated by a company called Good Doctor which is legit crawling with 3.6 billion American cockroaches. The cockroaches raised there, in the worldās only government-certified roach lab, are ākept pristineā because they will be used for human consumption.The company makes cockroach potions that are used to treat ulcers and skin wounds in Chinese hospitals, and makes a drinkable āRecovery New Potionā and a skin cream called āRainforest Regeneration.ā (Honest to god, I would rather eat my bodyweight in Soylent Green wafers).āIt is a good insect,ā Good Doctor president Fu Neng Geng said, adding that he eats ten of them every day.That's gonna be a no from us, dawg. But we bet those well-fed cockroaches are partying, Joe's Apartment-style.
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