Cambodian crickets: one man's plague, another's dinner

Mr. Ang doesn't profess to know why crickets congregate here, or much about their breeding cycle. He just knows that when he turns on his lights, crickets come, and this time of year, they're big enough to eat.

He's strung up three tarpaulin traps, each under a battery-powered fluorescent tube light, on the edge of a friend's rice field. A tarp behind each light acts as a backboard that the crickets, drawn to the light, bounce against before falling into the tarp below, where they're trapped. At dawn, Ang Thy carefully transfers the crickets – most of which have suffocated by then – into plastic buckets that he carries to market.

Ang loves to eat crickets – especially stuffed with peanuts and fried with a lot of garlic. "It's a very good smell," he says.

In the near distance, the lights of other men's traps cut through the darkness, but Ang Thy insists there's no competition out on the fields. "It's up to the crickets which trap they want to go to," he says. Nature, he figures, will give him what he needs, no need to go out and grab it.

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Cambodian crickets come in two sizes: Big and small. The big ones, about an inch long, are the more highly prized. Deep-fried, they're said to have the same appeal as popcorn does in the US. I like popcorn. And so, sitting across from Samean in one of the provincial town's few restaurants, I try to keep popcorn firmly in mind.

Samean is making quick work of a big plate of fried crickets. I decide to start small. He pulls off a leg and hands it to me. Popcorn doesn't have legs. I put it in my mouth before I can think about it too much. It is sweet, greasy, and crunchy, but definitely not delicious enough to continue with the thorax, antennae, and head. Why, after all, deprive Samean of the pleasure?

Samean eats the crickets by the dozen.

Having eaten my first and last cricket leg, I try to smile. I try to say, how nice for you that you have so many delicious crickets to eat. But I can't. What I say instead is: "I don't like crickets, Samean. I just can't eat them."

Just then a grasshopper, I kid you not, lands on the end of my nose. Samean laughs at me. He says, "I don't eat grasshoppers. My mother taught me to eat crickets but not grasshoppers. She said they are dirty. How can I change?"

I say: "My mother taught me that grasshoppers and crickets are both dirty. Though she did serve me cow tongue. And peanut butter pickle sandwiches, but only with dill pickles."

Samean has no problem with cow tongue. I don't know how he feels about peanut butter. He says, "I eat all kinds of insects. The black bugs in the water. Black scorpions, the big ones. They're very expensive, like $2 or $3."

"Big black scorpions are poisonous," I say.

Samean shrugs.

The front of our restaurant opens onto the main street of the provincial town, no more at this hour than a dark strip of low buildings that quickly diminishes into rice fields. Even now, crickets, those foolish creatures, are pushing through the night toward all the great white lights, only to end up a meal for their troubles.

By morning, they'll be so dead but still so anatomically perfect that they look like they could start crawling around at any moment. And, now and again, a diminished cricket will hobble from the great dead piles, and one will almost feel mercy.

But that is me, and not my friend Samean. I think he feels hungry.

• Additional reporting by Yun Samean

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