The Cambodians are well known for eating a variety of foods that Westerners (myself included) find rather odd.  Then again I imagine that they would find some of the crap we eat rather disgusting!

One commonplace food is spider, usually fried and crispy.  Mmmh.  Now spiders in Cambodia aren’t your little coin sized beasts we see so often, they are more akin to tarantulas in size, black and hairy.

I read that spiders were first eaten by desperate refugees, but have recently become known as a national delicacy, particularly in the Skuon region.  And when I say recently, I mean as recent as the 1990s!

Now people don’t just go trapsing around trying to spot and catch these spiders, they are actually bred in holes in the ground to eat, just like battery chickens!

The species are actually a type of tarantula and known as ‘a-ping’, and tend to be about palm-sized.  You can check them out in the pic below:

So how are they cooked?  Well as mentioned above, usually fried in oil, sometimes with garlic and salt, sometimes with sugar and MSG added.  The spiders are cooked until their legs are stiff, which means the insides are cooked through and no longer runny.

Taste?  Apparently something similar to chicken (doesn’t everything taste like chicken?) and cod, with some comparing them to crickets (which I have tried!).  Mostly crunchy but with a soft abdomen.  Inside the abdomen is a brown paste including organs and who knows what else (eggs, excrement …) – which many dislike or remove, while others call it a delicacy and chow down.

And it doesn’t just taste good – the locals swear by the spiders’ medicinal properties, such as helping relive back ache and asthma.

Price?  Well you can pick yourself up a crunchy deep fried spider for as little as 8 cents!  Sounds ridiculously cheap, but when you compare to the average daily wage of less than a dollar … it’s not a bad living if you can sell enough.  That said, the price of a spider is on the rise as supply starts to struggle to keep up with demand.