Skuon Fried Spider Snacks
In the Skuon region of Cambodia, tarantula spiders are deep fried and eaten by the plateful.
What’s black, hairy, loaded with garlic and butter, and, oh yeah—has eight legs? Correctimundo! Deep fried spiders!
Ask the locals in Skuon, Cambodia, and they’ll tell you the best fried spider is one plucked straight from its burrow and quickly fried with garlic and salt. Crispy on the outside with a gooey center, fried spiders should be served piping hot.
How Did Cambodians Start Eating Fried Spider?
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when the Khmer Rouge and leader Pol Pot’s Communist guerrillas force you out of the city and into the fields where there’s no food (that’s what happened to Cambodians in 1975-1979), you stay alive by eating grubs, crickets, and giant water beetles. And, you discover new delicacies like crispy fried tarantulas.
Fried Spiders Are Popular Snack Food
Skuon has become quite famous as “Spider Town.” Many tourists and regular minibus taxi passengers on their way to Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh can’t pass through Skuon without stopping to eat a few arachnids. Women bring the fried spiders to the traveler’s car windows on heaping plates, drenched with butter.
One fried spider costs the equivalent of $0.08, so a good day of selling a couple hundred fried spiders can earn $10-20. That’s not bad in Cambodia, where a third of the population live below a poverty line drawn at an income of $1.00 per day.
But what do they taste like? One aficianado says: “They taste a bit like crickets, only much better.”
Watch Nora and Sky munch some deep fried spiders:
Read more Amazing, Orgasmic, and Fantastic Facts: Amasnic Fact Off Archive.
Read More: fried spider, skuon, cambodia, tarantula, Khmer Rouge
Related Articles
March 15th, 2007 at 9:58 am
eeeeyoow!
I just saw an ad for that hideous, hateful, ann coulter on your site. What’s up with that?
That was worse than a plate of spiders (though both long legged).
btw, check out “sjlendman.blogspot.com”. This person makes understanding our crazy world very easy. He is always a long read, but you need to read far less of others.
March 15th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Egads! Obviously, Google’s AdSense logic is associating the word “spider” with Ann Coulter. Let’s see if we can get some more appropriate ads to display:
Checking out Steve Lendman’s blog…
March 15th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Well, as long as garlic is involved I’m ok.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Yum…gooey centers…and they taste like crickets, but even better!
I’m going to Cambodia. Always wanted to. One reason I moved to Costa Rica was because Cambodia and Costa Rica always seemed to jockey for first in the annual airline pilots’ poll of world’s most beautiful women.
March 15th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Steve: I smell you all the way over here! Cut down on the garlic ;-)
Indigobusiness: Seriously, you live in Costa Rica? That is way cool. Had a friend that went down there last year, did a canopy tour, said it was just a gorgeous place. But the thing that most impresses me about Costa Rica: it had the gonads to abolish its army. Wow.
March 15th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Yep, the military resources are now channeled into guaranteed higher education. Just have to pay for books. Literate country, but I don’t live there anymore.
If you walk up the hill on Avenida Central, you can still see the bullet holes in the old fortress. Viva la Revolucion! Abolish ALL armies, I say.
The problem with Costa Rica is it’s rotten with American spooks and con-men.
Agents and ex-agents fill the casinos.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:57 am
That’s fascinating about Costa Rica. I didn’t know that.