There are many weird and wonderful foods to be found around the globe, and if you’re an avid traveler, you’ve probably sampled a good few at some point.
Some, you may have loved and gained a taste for them, while others you might want to avoid at all costs! Entomophagy, for example, the practice of eating insects has been around since prehistoric times and is a popular food source in most parts of the world, including Central and South America, the African Continent, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
In fact, believe it or not, 80 percent of the world’s nations eat between 1,000 and 2,000 different species of insects. While the popular story is that spiders are a traditional foodstuff in Cambodia, there’s no evidence at all that they were popular or eaten as a snack until the rise of tourism in Cambodia in the mid-1990s.
Spiders are available for tourists at most of the popular Cambodian markets, but the epicenter of the trade is the dusty roadside market in Skuon, about a hundred kilometers from Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh.
The reason the spider trade centered on Skuon is that it was a bus stop on the way from the capital Phnom Penh to the temples in Siem Reap, a novelty to amuse domestic and foreign tourists alike. The people who buy them are almost entirely from out of town. There was no spider trade before tourism, and without tourism, it wouldn’t exist as a roadside snack.
As with all good tourist food, they come packaged with a thin veneer of authenticity that is manufactured. There might be some credence because eating spiders came about because of the deprivations of the Khmer Rouge era, but deep-fried snacks tend not to be a byproduct of mass starvation.
They’re Stuff White People Like because they fit the colonial narrative of foreign people eating strange and unknowable food; and bold food adventurers seeking the novel and the obscure in every food culture they happen upon. When you focus on the novelty in food culture, you miss the depth and the joy of ordinary food.
Unlike many other insect proteins for sale on the streets of Cambodia, the spiders for sale aren’t commercially grown like silkworms or crickets, or pests like locusts. While the LA Times started the rumor that they farmed spiders (and a spider sanctuary existed in Skuon in 2011), there are no farms and there never was a sanctuary.
In fact, Cambodia’s Mecca for devouring spiders is as popular as ever. Skuon, a nondescript dusty town about 90 km north of Phnom Penh, is the center of this extreme cuisine and continues to grow in popularity with more and more people visiting from the capital to dine on its arachnids.
The people of Skuon first started using the spider’s many generations ago in traditional medicines, as they are thought to be good for heart, throat, and lungs, but by the time Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime had come to an end, they had acquired quite a taste for the hairy critters.
