Tarantulas –black, big and hairy – are often first eaten at Skuon, a popular stopover for buses making it up National Highway 6 from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap.
The spiders, as large as a human palm, are dipped in salt and garlic prior to being pan fried. They taste a bit like crab yet more crunchy. The arachnids are essentially consumed as a snack food and most often accompanied by a cold beer or rice wine.
In Cambodia, Skuon is bug town. Local venders are found in the market arm-deep in buckets of crawling tarantulas as well as cooked crickets, locusts, silk worms, grasshoppers, and depending on the season, scorpions. Costs are about 0.50c per serve. Giant water bug and tarantulas however, are now fetching $1 a piece – a tenfold increase in value over the past decade due to their growing scarcity rather than an improving popularity, which for most people still registers among the most unthinkable things you could put to your mouth.
Tarantulas became food during the Khmer Rouge era when starving Cambodians turned to wildlife and insects to survive. They stayed as an acquired-taste food in the years that followed and gained appeal as a regional treat. They are commonly referred to as the edible spider.
But their jungle floor habitats are rapidly disappearing, and many locals feel that the days of the ‘a-ping’ are numbered. Since 1990, Cambodia has lost 20 per cent of its forest cover due to land clearing. Deforestation and unsustainable foraging are killing the tarantula business at a time when the worldwide consumption of insects and bugs is growing.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that 1,900 edible insect species are consumed as food globally and are part of the traditional diets of at least two billion people. The most common of these are beetles (31 percent), caterpillars (18 percent) and bees, wasps and ants (14 percent). Following in popularity are grasshoppers, locusts and crickets (13 percent).
According to the FAO, edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. They can be grown on organic waste and are a potential source for conventional production of protein for direct human consumption or indirectly in recomposed foods as well as a protein source for feedstock.
In Skuon, the tarantula remains food on the table. And money in the pocket.
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