This text was published in 'Beyond The Pancake Trench', published by Orchid Books as well as in Farang Magazine.

The best tarantula in the world is deep-fried in garlic and salt. Crispy and shiny black on the outside and gooey on the inside, the tarantulas, locally known as a-ping in Cambodia, should be served hot. They taste a bit like crickets. Or grasshoppers. Or bamboo grubs. Or chicken.
The best way to eat a-ping is to pull the legs off first, these are usually crispy, like French Fries. Then just split the body open and devour the soft flesh inside.
When I get out of the taxi in the small town Skuon, somewhere between Kompong Cham and Phnom Penh, I’m accosted by a small army of friendly Khmer ladies, their heads wrapped in the traditional kramas, who carry huge trays, loaded with the town’s premier delicacy – fat, black, hairy, venomous spiders. Lovely.

Cambodia is a poor country with a long recent history of war and famine. And the Khmer kitchen has been adapting itself all through the years of sparsity. The popular myth tells us that the Khmers first consumed spiders in the days of the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields in the mid-seventies. In those days, a-ping were vital sustenance. There was little else to eat.
These days the spiders are bred in the ground round near-by villages, so supplies should be ok for years to come.
The ladies of Skuon do the hard sell but readily admit that foreigners rarely stop and when they do, they never purchase more than one or two spiders. Luo, the guy I am sharing the taxi with, is enthusiastic though, “These spiders are the best in Cambodia. The ones you find in the markets in Phnom Penh don’t even come close.”
Luo also remembers eating a –ping in his childhood. “We ate everything we could find. The Khmer Rouge drove us out of the city, all of us, the entire population. They destroyed all businesses and schools. We all became farmers. And there was nothing to eat. As a child I was always hungry. Even when the Vietnamese invaded, it didn’t get better for a long time. I ate rats from the paddy fields and insects, even wasps and big water beetles. Anything to keep me alive. The spiders were good. That’s why you can still buy them all over the country today.”

Luo buys a family bumper pack of fried up arachnids and then heads over to a lady holding a big canvass sack. After brief negotiations the lady reaches into the sack and pulls out a handful of tarantulas – alive and kicking - which she herds into a paper bag and hands it to Luo. The she pulls out another one and sticks it to the front of my shirt. The other ladies are laughing their heads off. The tarantula on my chest doesn’t move. Neither do I.
Luo chucks his bag into the cab and says, “My wife will be happy to get some of these alive. She will make wine, spider wine. It’s very good, very delicious.”
He laughs shyly and continues, while I am still struggling with my first dead spider in my hand, nervously watching its sibling feeling at home on my shirt, “There are no hospitals in Cambodia, no one can afford the few doctors who work in Phnom Penh. Spider Wine is a good remedy for aches and pains. And of course, it gets you drunk too.”
The spider lady grabs the arachnid off my shirt and sticks it to her own. The spider remains docile. Luo is already in the cab, his hand in the bag of fried spiders I hope, munching away.

Traditional medicine has been around in Cambodia for hundreds of years and under the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s, when there were no medical facilities left in the entire country, there was a real renaissance of products with alleged medicinal properties. The spiders are squeezed into bottles of rice wine, which is then sold, saturated with the bloated corpses of the expired tarantulas. Snake wine is popular too and bottles, filled with a little wine and a lot of snake, are on sale in Phnom Penh.
A bottle of spider wine sells for up to 3$, a tidy sum in Cambodia where a third of the population live on less than 1 $ a day, and demand is on the increase. In the capital, Phnom Penh, spider prices are rising as suppliers can’t get their hands on enough animals.
Luo looks at me as I take a bite out of the body, almost choke and then swallow and concludes, “The spiders are becoming more popular for us Khmers. My friends all like them. But I don’t think it will catch on with the tourists soon.”

Tastes like chicken. Really.