The Tangled Web We Weave
Exploring Cambodia through the story of a spider … a really big spider
Story and Photos by Dana Zartner
It is the crunch of the legs that has stayed with me the most. The sound reminds me of the shoestring potatoes that topped many a hotdish (or casserole, for those not from the Midwest) at neighborhood picnics when I was growing up. But this crunch is definitely not from shoestring potatoes, and Cambodia is about as far from my rural Minnesota upbringing as can be.
After several hours on the road, we pull into the dusty parking lot. Opening the door of the van, a wall of steamy heat rushes in, overcoming the feeble stream of air conditioning. Climbing out, I land in the reddish-brown muck that seems to exist everywhere, despite the fact that it hasn’t rained in days. Immediately I am surrounded; there is no way to hide when you are a giant pink-and-yellow person who floats a half-foot above everyone else around. Bags of dried mangos, papaya and pineapple for sale are thrust in our faces as we try to get our bearings. The roadside market is lined on one side with covered shops not much larger than office cubicles; a sensory overload of stalls selling everything from underwear to cooking utensils to gasoline in reused soda bottles. On the other side, folding tables and colorful plastic chairs stretch across the dusty ground, piled high with fresh tropical fruits: mangosteens, dragon fruit and the spiny rambutans. In one corner, a skinny man dressed only in khaki shorts uses a machete to slice the tops off of giant green coconuts, which can be purchased, along with a straw, to drink the water inside. Over the chatter of women hawking their fruit, I hear the sizzle through the crowd. That sizzle can only mean one thing: tarantulas are on the menu.
After the crunch comes the squish. A squish with a lovely sweet-tangy essence of garlic, pepper, and maybe a little sugar, but a squish nonetheless. My friend Mike says he doesn’t mind the squish — that it reminds him of eating a marshmallow. I don’t know what kind of marshmallows he ate growing up, but to me the squish seems exactly like what it is: the body of a spider … a really big spider. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. I might describe it more as a teriyaki-flavored oyster blob. As I walk amidst the bustle, with the anticipation of the crunch and squish forefront in my mind, I am welcomed back to the Spider Market of Skun, and to the heart of what, for me, is the beautiful, haunting complexity that is Cambodia.
As I wander through the market, I am transported back almost a decade to my first experience at Skun when I decided to visit Cambodia on a last-minute invitation, tagging along with a group of students and a professor friend and filling the worst-named position in the world: ‘genocide expert.’ My official job was to provide insight into the ongoing trials against former Khmer Rouge leaders. Unofficially, I went along because I wanted to experience something new. After a couple of tumultuous years, which included finalizing a divorce, taking a new job, and moving across the country, I was restless for something meaningful, something that would align with my passion for environmental justice and that would fill the empty space from leaving behind not only a marriage, but the community of friends and family that went with it.
Before that first trip, one of the students told me about the fried tarantula as a rite of passage for Cambodian travelers. While not quite believing her, a quick tour through YouTube showed numerous videos of tourists — even Angelina Jolie with her kids — munching on whole, fried tarantulas in the markets of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. In the videos, you often couldn’t tell what was actually being eaten, as each leg and body segment was puffy with a coating of fried dough. I figured this must just be something for the tourists; $5 dollars for a blob of fried spider and a good story to tell back home.
But that is not the case in Skun, which sits at a dusty corner in a curve of National Route 6 in the province of Kampong Cham. Here tarantulas are a serious business. Bugs of all kinds are available for sale and tables are piled high with grasshoppers, crickets, silkworms, ants and giant beetles.
But the tarantulas have long been the centerpiece of this market halfway between the temples of Angkor Wat and the bustle of the capital. Many of the same women have been sitting at the same tables piled high with their spiders for years, and from them, I learned that this tasty treat is not just a tourist gimmick, but a favorite Cambodian snack.
During that first visit, our Cambodian guides, Boreth and Saren, introduced us to the market at Skun, laughing with (or at?) us as we pulled off the first leg (crunch) and attempted to bite into the body (squish). Saren popped a whole spider in his mouth without a moment’s hesitation and, with a wink, dared me to do the same. It didn’t prove quite that easy at first as the mental image of what I was eating took a while to overcome. But, in the course of our time in the market, bonding through laughter as I nibbled my way through my first tarantula, we became connected in the way that you can when you share a meal.
As I pulled off one leg (crunch) after another (crunch, crunch) from my snack — a particularly hefty specimen Boreth insisted on selecting for me — I learned that tarantulas are a regular part of the Cambodian diet, as well as a cultural symbol, a historical necessity and an environmental marker. Contrary to what you see on YouTube, most Cambodians don’t prepare them like a Southern mee-maw making fried chicken. Rather they are served as they are at the roadside market in Skun; they are fried, yes, but without the breaded coating. They are served black, whole and shiny, with every aspect of their tarantula features visible, including the individual hairs on the long, crunchy legs, so you can select the best one. Or you could find the women walking around with live tarantulas crawling all over them and choose a living specimen to drop in the oil. They were even happy to let you hold it first to get a true sense of whether it was the best choice for your snack. The bite of Cambodian tarantulas is not fatal and they have been defanged, but still I opted not to take advantage of that opportunity and instead bought one from the pre-fried platter.
That first afternoon in Skun is etched in my memory as a symbol of this country I have grown to love — of its history, culture and community. I had marveled at the temples of Angkor Wat, cried at the memorials to the victims of the Khmer Rouge, planted trees blessed by monks with local kids, and talked with fishermen about shrinking fish stocks impacting the floating villages of Tonle Sap. But it was only after my first trip to the Spider Market of Skun that I felt welcomed into some tiny part of the real Cambodia … and I loved it.
A year later, I returned to research reforestation efforts and visit my Cambodian friends who shared more with me about the thread connecting Cambodians and their spiders. In Kampong Thom, a forested area two hours from Skun where many of the market’s tarantulas were from, we sat around a table cobbled together from different lengths of wood. Members of the community spoke of their memories of the spiders (‘aping’ in Khmer). Over a plate of freshly fried aping, Village Chief Mean reminisced on how his “father would steep an aping in a bottle of rice wine” because drinking the tarantula-infused spirit was supposed to promote good health. Im, a younger member of the community, chimed in to say that “eating aping is good for joint problems,” a comment which solicited nods from everyone around the table. Given my own achy knees after days of walking in the forest and climbing in and out of boats, I was tempted to pull a second spider from the platter. As I continued to chew, one of the community matriarchs, Vey, a tiny woman with a beaming gap-toothed smile, spoke up, gesturing wildly. A sudden burst of giggles erupted from the women standing shyly around us. This, coupled with the fact that Saren, who was interpreting, blushed slightly and was too embarrassed to translate, made me suspect she was highlighting some kind of aphrodisiac properties the spiders are thought to possess. They must be the stuff of legend because, even later, I never was able to cajole Saren into telling me what Vey said.
But the history of this food is not all giggles. Aping were an important protein source in the Cambodian diet through some of the most difficult periods of the country’s history. During the years of the Khmer Rouge, when most Cambodians were either forced to fight or work in the fields, food was severely rationed and often withheld. People resorted to what they could find to stay alive: frogs, snails and all kinds of bugs, including the tarantula. In her memoir, First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung tells the story of her 5-year-old self pulling the wings and heads off bugs she and her siblings caught and roasting them with salt and pepper to eat when food became scarce. Thirty years later, however, when filming the movie version of her book, the author said in an interview with People magazine that the cast and crew often ate bugs on set to relax and the film’s lead actress, 9-year-old Sareum Srey Moch, would crunch on fried tarantulas “like they were popcorn.” Tarantulas: from survival necessity to tasty treat in a generation.
In the 1990s, as Cambodia slowly emerged from its past, economic development and an opening-up of the country created a new thread in the story of the aping. After endless years of conflict, the spider remained a staple as Cambodia worked to rebuild. The popularity of the spiders grew, however, along with tourism, and you could find them for sale in the markets around the country. Skun, while not a hotbed of tourist activity, began to receive more visitors specifically interested in the tarantulas. Restaurants also began adding bugs to their menus. Some, like Marum in Siem Reap and Romdeng in Phnom Penh, offered more gourmet takes on traditional fare, such as sautéed beef with red ants or the fried tarantula appetizer where aping were arranged on a platter with a black pepper and lime dipping sauce.
Other restaurants, like the Bug Café in Siem Reap, built their menus around the novelty of eating a variety of insects and other creatures, such as scorpions coated with batter and fried up as puffy, golden-brown balls. What I didn’t know at the time of my last visit, before the world locked itself down, was that with this increase in the popularity of the tarantulas, a dark side had emerged for the aping.
In 2022, after a long three years, I finally was able to return to Cambodia. I couldn’t wait to reconnect with my Cambodian friends and this place that always brought me a sense of inspiration and renewal. I heard once, on the TV show Royal Pains of all places, that travel to Southeast Asia creates this sense of ‘moving forward’ because it is a place that is focused on living in the now and embracing innovation for the future rather than holding to the past. I think there is truth in this, and I believe it is one of the reasons I hold Cambodia so close in my heart. But the market I returned to at Skun differed from the one etched in my mind. While the entire market seemed smaller, with fewer colorful stalls, there was one change more noticeable than the others: no sizzle in the air.
Some of the market remained the same: the bags of dried fruit, the tiny plastic stools in a rainbow of colors, and the piles of silkworms, water bugs, grasshoppers and crickets. But where were the aping? Eventually, I found them in a small corner of the marketplace, but the piles on platters were much diminished, and the spiders themselves not such grand specimens. There were no samples frying in the pan and no one walking around with live tarantulas crawling on their arms to showcase their wares. The one I bought for my snack was twice as expensive as it had been and had less crunch and squish since it was much smaller than those I had eaten during my earlier visits.
“Where are all the aping?” I asked. Maybe, like everything else, their absence was an effect of the pandemic? The extended lock-down of Cambodia’s borders did have a devastating impact on tourism (in fact the Bug Café, Romdeng, and Marum have all closed their doors). Maybe this was low season for tarantulas? Maybe it was a slow day at the market? But the answer I received was much more complicated: the tarantulas are in danger. What had been, in my mind at least, an indelible and lasting symbol of this country, had now become something else: an omen of change, not only to Cambodia, but everywhere, in the form of environmental catastrophe.
According to my friend Boreth Sun, who has visited Skun with me since my first trip and who works on community development projects throughout the country, “over-harvesting and consumption” have resulted in a severe shortage of aping. The species of tarantula found in Cambodia — the Thai zebra tarantula –burrows deep in the ground, most often in forested areas. As the trees have disappeared and more and more land is cultivated for agriculture and development, the tarantula population has also dwindled. The loss of the spiders is altering “the natural biodiversity of the ecosystems,” Boreth said later over cold bottles of Angkor beer. The sellers at Skun, who used to find their products locally, now often have to buy spiders from sellers four to five hours away, at double the cost. The tarantulas are also being captured younger — hence the smaller size — which in turn has a negative impact on the population. Without protections, Boreth said, shaking his head, and more education “on the importance of these spiders for the health of the natural world,” there is fear the tarantulas may disappear. Once again, the spiders mark a moment of reckoning for this small country.
While I remain an outsider to this community, I have come to deeply love this place and I am worried that the dwindling spider population is a canary in a coal mine. The loss of the spiders has a heavy impact: on the livelihoods of the market women of Skun, on the spider hunters themselves, on the local guides who share this experience with visitors, on communities who still engage in traditional practices and for all of us for who — whether we enjoy the crunch and squish of this fried snack or not — experience the loss of traditional foods and cultural practices in our own communities.
The spiders are a symbol for Cambodia, a country haunted by its past and seeking to find its foothold in the future. As the tarantulas disappear, a part of the country is lost. The women still sit in the market at Skun, their diminished piles of glistening fried aping on the tables next to them. Many tourists will pay the higher prices they are asking for the experience of eating a tarantula, but a question hangs over it all: What will happen next — to the tarantulas, to their environment, and to the humans who live there too?
If I have learned one thing from my time in this country, however, it is that Cambodia is also incredibly resilient. While assistance from the government or international aid organizations has not yet sufficiently addressed the declining tarantula population, local communities are stepping up. In Kampong Thom, community tree-planting days are becoming more common, bringing everyone from children to grandparents to local Buddhist monks together to learn about sustainability and replenish the forest. Reforestation benefits everyone, improving soil and water quality, providing shade, and producing food, including tarantulas. On one tree-planting excursion, while the kids laughed at me because I tried to plant a tree while it was still in its protective burlap sack, the local tarantula hunters talked about more sustainable hunting practices; leaving spiders that are too small alone in order to allow them to grow and breed. Without government help and regulations, these practices are not likely to be enough in and of themselves. But the power of grassroots efforts to save the forests and save the tarantulas was already having an impact when I returned the following year.
On my most recent visit, the spiders were still scarce but the conversation among the sellers at Skun held a note of optimism. As dark as the pandemic shutdown was, those years may have had a positive impact on the tarantula population, allowing the spiders time to breed and grow. And while development projects that impact the aping’s territory have not slowed, there has also been growth in the number of grassroots organizations in the country focused on environmental justice, and an increase in activism, especially by women, to create more sustainable opportunities for their communities’ futures.
The beauty of Cambodia is often mirrored by its sadness. The two are never far from one another. If the tarantulas disappear, something else may come along to take their place. But is that what we want? Something is lost in the eternal war between development and preservation, culture and modernization, humans and nature. At Skun, that loss may be symbolized by a tarantula with its eight legs fried crispy like those shoestring potatoes I loved as a kid. But the history of the aping is a long one, and as the spider helped people survive several decades ago, it is now people who are dedicating themselves to ensure it is the tarantulas that survive: for the environment, for the culture, and for those looking for a tasty treat. As Boreth told me, “The balance between this local delicacy, the economy, and healthy and biodiverse ecosystems must be maintained. But I still love to eat them!”
Crunch. Squish.
