Cambodian crickets: one man's plague, another's dinner
This year's bumper crop of insects is providing snacks and export income.

In another place, the great, if harmless, clouds of insects might have been a plague. In Cambodia, they are dinner.

It's a bumper year for crickets here in what is known informally as Cambodia's cricket capital. By night, the rice fields blaze with lights from the traps farmers set up to lure the insects. By morning, the markets are hopping with great heaps of dead and dying crickets.

Men stand around nibbling from the bags of deep-fried bugs they've promised to bring home to their wives and children. Sor Van Nin came all the way from the capital, Phnom Penh, for these crickets, and he can't stop eating them.

"They're so fresh," he says, grinning, a few stray antennae stuck to his chin.

I've come to Kampong Thom with my friend, Yun Samean, who is crazy for crickets. I think he came mostly for the snacks. I came for the history. Pol Pot, who oversaw the deaths of 2 million people in Cambodia in the late 1970s, grew up here, just down a slow lane by the Stung Sen River. His neighbors remember him as a nice kid.

That is a Cambodian mystery I will never solve, but maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to understand the strange – but, to me, terrible – appeal of the cricket. I will try anyway, an effort that will surely involve eating one, and if I am going to eat a cricket, I want the finest, freshest, crunchiest cricket around. And that means driving to Kampong Thom.

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Kampong Thom lies about halfway between Phnom Penh and its most famous tourist destination, Angkor Wat. In addition to being the birthplace of Pol Pot, Kampong Thom was the site of one of the largest slave-labor irrigation projects built by the Khmer Rouge, radical communist ideologues who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and killed, starved, or worked to death about a quarter of the population. Today, people water their rice from the very canals that once nearly cost them their lives. Some 20,000 skulls were found at the local pagoda. Those who managed to survive kept their heads down and did not ask questions.

Compared with a single spoonful of watery gruel or red ants – known sources of sustenance during those dreadful years – crickets probably seem fat, even nourishing to anyone over 35.

Each year, during the May-to-December rainy season, crickets migrate here by the ton. Locals have eaten crickets for as long as they can remember, which for Nuch Mondy – a local government agriculture official – is the 1950s. But, he says, the cricket business didn't boom until a few years ago, when fancy new technologies – namely, the battery- or generator-powered fluorescent tube lights one now sees strung above white tarpaulin traps in the rice fields around Kampong Thom – enabled people to catch commercial quantities of crickets.

In peak season, the local haul is often 3 tons a night, which is packed in plastic bags on ice and sent to markets in Phnom Penh and Thailand.

"Crickets are useful insects," Mr. Nuch says. "People make money from them."