At first blush, Skuon looks like an unremarkable Cambodian market town that logically grew up around two intersecting transportation arteries, National Highway 6 and National Highway 7. But the tour bus parked in front of the market hadn’t stopped to merely give passengers a restroom break. They were there to indulge foreigners in a genuine Fear Factor street food experience – an opportunity to eat fried spider, cricket, and grasshopper.
I first learned of “Spiderville” ten years ago when I bought Man Eating Bugs at the San Francisco Book Fair. The book’s cover photo made it an easy sell. It was a headshot of a smiling Khmer girl biting into a fried tarantula on a skewer with a nasty bit held for effect between her teeth. So when our Cambodian hosts suggested we stop in Skuon while en route to Siem Reap, I immediately remembered the girl and jumped at the opportunity to see if this was something to include on an itinerary my business partner, Brian, and I were developing for our travel company.
If you are truly interested in understanding a people, experiencing local food is an inseparable part of it. Not only does it give you a direct connection to the land and waters of the place you are visiting, the manner of eating is an expression of the culture that evolved from the region’s means to sustain a society. Easier said than done, I know. I find it helps to take a child-like approach to the culinary equivalent of making a Hansel and Gretel foray into the woods. Whatever it may look like, you really don’t know if you will like a dish unless you sample it. People will sincerely respect you for making the effort to try a delicacy of theirs, knowing it typically evokes revulsion in foreigners. And if you actually like the dish, the delight people will express in your shared enjoyment will be ample payback for the risk taken.
Arriving at Skuon’s market, there’s no need to hunt for the fried insects. The vendors know tourists are there to indulge in a yin and yang of revulsion and fascination. Either you will be cornered by competing mobile hawkers proffering their offerings on platters, or steered in the appropriate direction by helpful locals. Take your pick of crunchy cricket, crispy grasshopper, or sizzled spider, if you dare. Alternatively, live tarantulas are sold to make a tonic believed to enhance male virility. They are drowned in rice liquor, then steeped for a couple of weeks until the invigorating essence of the spider turns the transparent liquid to colour. I didn’t feel a need to test this out.
Our guide bought us a half dozen of the fried spiders for sampling. Compared to the live one crawling on Brian, these looked scrawny. Perhaps that’s why I found they tasted like bland roasted nuts. With a larger abdomen, there would have been extra soft flesh to eat. Instead, the crunchy texture of these was more memorable than the taste. Salted, they would have made good beer snacks, like the crispy fish filets we had at our homestay in Phu Hoa Village in the Mekong Delta. Being in a bit of a rush to reach Siem Reap before sunset, we found ourselves loading up on ready-to-eat seasonal fruits instead, which were a more suitable refreshment from the heat at that point than beer.
A taste for insects has since grown in Phnom Penh too. This has spurred the growth of a harvesting industry in the countryside. You can see it from the highways. Front yards and fields sprout plastic sheets held taut by wooden frames emerging from makeshift water receptacles. A black light tube is suspended in front of the plastic so that when turned on at night, attracts the insects who collide with the plastic sheet, then slide to a watery death below. The critters are fried in the morning and delivered fresh to the market for sale.
Not to leave people with a mistaken impression, Cambodian entomophagy is a relatively recent phenomenon that doesn’t hold the entire country in its grip. Apparently, the taste for tarantula in the Skuon area came about out of desperation during the disastrous Khmer Rouge attempt at agricultural reform, when food was in short supply. The silver lining to have emerged from those dark days is the jobs that have been generated, when making a decent living for so many Cambodians is still a challenge.
~ RG
