The Acquired Tastes of Foodies and Cockroaches

Bitterness functions like an alarm blaring, “Beware!” Its wretched¹ taste can repulse, but also rescue, as with a roach population whose survival has befuddled exterminators since 1987. That’s when Jules Silverman, an entomologist at a New Jersey-based company that made insect bait, began to receive boxes of live cockroaches that hadn’t been killed by the company’s glucose-laced bait.

Silverman found that the surviving roaches refused to touch glucose. The roach colonies he reared in the lab, on the other hand, readily ate the simple