Kevin Longa » #FoodFriday: Future of Food in (Cambodian) Insects

The food: Assorted Insects

Where to find it: Street food stall, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

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Insects wriggle and squirm. Westerns who eat them might do the same—at first.

Off in a daft corner of Phnom Penh, under burning fluorescent lights characteristic of an interrogation room await baskets of fried critters: grasshoppers, beetles, wood worms, cockroaches, spiders, chicken embryos. The table could double as some deranged Roger Corman-esque set piece. Instead, it’s a culinary destination.

The fried insect food stall owns different meanings for different people. Cambodian locals treat it as their matter-of-fact food staple—their everyday grocery store. Westerners approach it as some cirque du freakshow. I can just imagine a scary clown named ‘Happy’ galloping and shrieking to frightened children and passersby to “Step right up” and experience the Oriental, edible sideshow of fried dung beetles. Yum.

When I approached the insect stall, I succumbed to my tourist demons and shamelessly plopped down $1 USD to film and eat a king-sized fried grasshopper. Immediately after lifting the surprisingly hairy arthropod, I could feel my own hairs and goosebumps stiffening to attention. Yet, despite the foreboding novelty of eating potentially food-sickness-inducing street grub, I experienced a “here goes nothing” curiosity to the meal.

I gnawed a good half of the grasshopper head-first into my mouth and found it, unsurprisingly, crunchy and, surprisingly, supple. Just like my experience eating a Tarantula, it tasted like chewing on a hollow peanut shell, but the grasshopper offered more meat. I must say, that I have to default to the good, old adage, “It tastes like chicken.”

Just like chicken, insects offer sustenance and utility to whole societies. Cambodians have insect-inspired recipes that have sustained their society for years. We can’t deny that insects live everywhere in abundance. We step on millions of bugs everyday when we go outside. Researchers once found nearly 10,000 arthropods per square foot in a Pennsylvanian oak forest¹. So naturally, many scientists claim that eating insects could solve world hunger. Plus, when you have innovative, western food cultures like San Francisco dishing out critters via the food truck Don Bugito and the world’s former best restaurant in the world, Noma, serving ants, then you know insects might very well rule our meals in the future. Perhaps 1977’s campy horror flick Empire of the Ants had it right: insects will take over the world. And to think the trend started with humble roots in Cambodian cuisine.

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¹Source: “O. Orkin Insect Zoo: Basic Facts–Insect Numbers.” O. Orkin Insect Zoo: Basic Facts–Insect Numbers. Mississippi State University, 1997. Web. 26 July 2013.
²If you’d like to see more food & travel pictures then like Longa Travels Productions on Facebook to keep up-to-date with our film shoot and see our “Snapshots Across Southeast Asia” photo series.

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See below for some of the insect delicacies I discovered at the street food stall. (All captions refer to the corresponding picture above it.)