I’m suspicious of people with food allergies even though rationally, they do exist. I’ve seen people turn a shade of vermillion after eating shellfish and bloat after lactose. I doubt that sort of reaction is psychophysiological and if it is, I’m surprised that the brain could play that type of grim trick on the body. My suspicion is completely borne from my love of eating nigh on anything with only the occasional betrayal by my body and its stark inability to process something toxic or bacterial.

However, I don’t eat fermented paddy crabs.

Anything belonging to the genus Somanniathelphusa that has undergone controlled rotting, I try to avoid. The rice paddy crab is often considered as vermin across Asia. They eat newly-planted ricefields and when the fields dry out they burrow into the mud until the next season’s rains (or irrigation) brings them out again. They collect innumerable parasites in the same way that any animal that makes lukewarm tropical mud its home. The crabs are used as bait for fish and for feeding pigs. As a food for humans, they’re tasty and tend to turn up in some versions of the Thai green papaya salad, som tam, and versions of bun rieu cua, a Vietnamese rice noodle and tomato broth. For your average rice farmer, they’re full of protein and have the added advantage for the subsistence farmer that destroying them increases rice yield.

Fresh, I don’t mind the diminutive freshwater crustacean. I’ve downed plates of them, whole and crispy after deep-frying, outside of Hanoi. But once they’ve undergone the pickling process and if they’re used in a less than judicious manner, to me, they just taste like a rotting crab. It is a taste that lodges itself deep into your sinuses. Any other fermented fish or crustacean product I can stomach but for some reason this one variety of crab eludes my palate and defeats me.

I’m in Cambodia at the moment and you can barely find a market that isn’t awash with paddy crabs. They seem more common than any other other crustacean around; not necessarily by volume, but by their sheer frequency and availability.

Many roadside stalls stock a large jar packed with their purplish claws; rural folk commute in from the surrounding provinces to sell a handful of them at the Phnom Penh markets throughout the day. It is hot season at the moment, so my guess is that this isn’t the peak paddy crab fishing time, but the heat means that the pickled crabs smell like they’re at peak fermentation.

When people ask me out for dinner, the chances are low that my lack of interest in the paddy crab will be a problem. I never really mention it.

It is hardly a secret shame. At least, not anymore.