Not Everyone has Cereal for Breakfast

31 March 2008

One of the great things about  broadcasting from overseas is the inevitable whack that you get on the side of the head.

By that I mean that you learn that all the things that you do are not necessarily what other people do.

Take breakfast for example. Many people in Australia will eat breakfast cereals (consisting of lots of sugar mixed in with a bit of oat or rice or corn and labelled as health food). Others will eat eggs with a slab of pig as a side. Others, like Addy, will have oats (after she’s scraped them off the inside of the microwave).

Our recent broadcast from the Water Festival in Phnom Penh opened my eyes to something else.

We were waiting to be interviewed by a local television station on the afternoon before the broadcast, when one of the people helping us out opened a packet of what looked like chips. But it wasn’t chips. It was a packet of dried spiders.

 Did I say spiders? They looked more like tarantulas.

My vegan self abstained, but everyone else in our Australian contingent sampled the fare.

Mark Hemetberger:

Even the Cambodian in the group, Seda Douglas, didn’t look too convinced.

So how did they taste? Well our tech man, Steve Hassett had a spider’s leg and described it in the following way:

It tasted like MSG soaked in soy sauce and coated in a thick lacquer to make it taste remotely bearable.

All I can say is, we vegans miss out of some things like ice creams, but not having to digest lacquered spiders makes up for it.