Jedzenie ptaszników w kambodży, Ptaszniki - Pdfy
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ndrewSmith’s
Tarantula Journal –
Entry: May 1st 2012
Collecting & Eating
Tarantula Spiders in
Cambodia
The very first thing we did on
entering Phnom Penh was to
scour the red light district in
search of one of the very few
street sellers in the city who
sell
deep
fried
tarantula
spiders.
Unfortunately
she
was absent that evening, so we
had to make do photographing
a plate of deep fried green
water bugs. Not quite what we
had intended, but the other
street traders assured us that
our lady would be back the
next day. Exhausted after our
long flight, we enjoyed a cold
beer and joined the crowds of
Cambodians who every
evening sashay down Sisowath
Quay
for
their
evening
constitutional.
The very next day - to our
surprise, we found her plying
her trade in the afternoon –
and it was quickly obvious that she was running a bigger operation than many
of the street girls we had seen the previous evening – who were selling street
snacks out of a basket on their heads. Our lady had cart, a deep fat fryer and a
large plastic bowl of deep fried tarantula spiders – dusted in chilli and garlic.
Now the temptation was to snack before lunch – but as were about to hit the
road in search of tarantula spiders – common sense slapped the back of my
legs and warned me that if we indulged, it was highly likely that that the team
would spend much of the next day with their trousers around their ankles with
raging diarrhoea. Our Cambodian driver and fixer Ben Wee suggested instead
the Romdeng restaurant – an experience, which he assured us, was less likely
to lead to tears. BE WARNED: should you decide to buy from a street vendor –
we quickly concluded that although the spiders at the top of these spider
stacks are likely to be fresh – much of the lower layers are refried old stock.
So - after asking permission to photograph her display and after popping some
dollars into her hand to tell us all
about the origin and cost of her
stock and the history of selling
spiders in the capitol - we headed
off to the Romdeng.
Now - this is an establishment,
which we found not only to be a
most excellent restaurant but also
one which has a laudable policy of
training ex street children for the
capitols catering trade - one of
whom, Kang Savgeuth turned out
to be a font of knowledge on
’Ping’s. He quickly informed that
the common Cambodian name for
tarantula spiders in that region of
Cambodia is Buffalo Spider. This is a
name, which is also used in
Skuon/Skun, one of the primary centres of the trade, to describe the black
Haplopelma
species - which was once common in the region. But alas no more!
Elsewhere on this site you find a video clip that Guy Tansley filmed in the
restaurant, with the team munching and deliberating on the taste of the three
spiders, which we purchased for 4 US dollars.
Guy Tansley and Paul Carpenter admiring a tastefully arranged luncheon plate!
You will be glad to know that they did not taste of chicken. More like the
peanut oil that they were deep fried in. What was special was the Kampot
pepper and lime dip, which accompanied the spiders.
Now in the 50 minute lecture,
Collecting & Eating Tarantula Spiders in
Cambodia
, which you can download for the princely sum of £2 we go into
much more detail about the food trade, the collecting of the spiders and the
one hundred dollar question – is the trade sustainable? All of which, involved
interviewing a large number of people, operating at all levels in the trade –
from the wholesalers who collected them, down to the retailers who sold them
on the streets.
I also wanted answers to the common fallacy on the internet that the eating of
these spiders began with the Khmer Rouge. Time and time again you will read
that starving urbanites, forced out of the cities to work on PolPot’s vast
irrigation projects were forced to eat “vermin”tosurvive.YetIhaveb/w
images of tarantula spiders on restaurant tables takenintheearly1960’s–
which does rather undermine this piece of urban folklore. I also have much
earlier references from an unpublished manuscript by the British
arachnologists William Bristowe, who travelled extensively in the Far East in
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