The crystals act as a complete food, containing time-released proteins, fats, sugars and essential amino acids. Its caloric and nutritional density is of great interest to scientists on the hunt for how to feed the world's exploding populations. Since barns full of roaches hooked to milking machines would be a less-than-efficient method of getting this precious elixir to human consumption, the researchers are developing ways to sequence the genes to reproduce the milk in the lab.