Article Summary
• Invasive green crabs in the Gulf of Maine are devouring clams and lobsters—key species to the region’s seafood economy.
• Green crab populations are exploding as warming waters in the Gulf create ideal conditions for them.
• Khmer Maine, a nonprofit serving Portland’s Cambodian community, has launched a traditional Cambodian salted crab product—kdam prai—using the green crabs.
• If the effort succeeds, it could make a dent in the green crab population and offer local fishers another way to make an income.
Bunly Uy missed home. In 2015, he moved from Cambodia to Maine at 22 to study sustainable agriculture and food systems at the College of the Atlantic. In pursuing his passion, though, he’d left behind his community, his culture, and his cuisine.
In those early days in America, it was Cambodian food Uy most longed for—the soups, curries, and rice dishes that married fresh and fermented, striking the perfect balance of sweet, sour, salty, and umami. At one point, he traveled all the way to Long Beach, California, home of the country’s largest Cambodian population, in search of connection and familiar flavors.
Among the foods Uy missed most, salted crab, or kdam prai, held a special place. Before he moved from a village in Kampot province, in southwestern Cambodia, to Phnom Penh, the capital, he often went into the nearby rice fields with his family, where small brown crabs burrowed into the wet mud of the paddies. After harvesting—which kept the crabs from damaging the crop—they cleaned and soaked them for two days in fish sauce, sugar, and garlic.
“We are showing how immigrants impact our communities and contribute to culture, economy, and ecology.”
His family’s salted crab, chopped up with the shells still on, starred as an unmistakable ingredient in papaya salad, more for the distinct flavor it imparted than the meager meat it offered. Marinated in lime, Thai basil, chili peppers, and more garlic, it was also served as a side dish alongside rice. Salted crab was everywhere in Cambodia. In the U.S., even a frozen import was hard to find; fresh was unthinkable.
“It’s the small things you miss, especially when you don’t have access,” Uy says.
A decade later, Uy is bringing kdam prai to Maine. He’s now the food and farm program manager at Khmer Maine, a nonprofit serving Portland’s 2,000-plus Cambodian residents through cultural exchange, community building, and civic engagement. And he’s marrying his past and present by developing a salted crab product featuring an invasive species from the Gulf of Maine, protecting the state’s marine ecosystem while feeding his community.
Khmer Maine’s Bunly Uy with European green crabs. (Photo credit: Neil Stanton)
If You Can’t Beat Them, Eat Them
In Cambodia, resourceful farmers and cooks turned a crop-damaging pest—the rice-paddy crab —into a culinary staple. Uy’s new home is dealing with its own nuisance crustacean: the European green crab, a voracious invasive predator that has taken a bite out of Maine’s critical fisheries by feeding on soft-shell clams and juvenile lobsters. Green crabs have also contributed to steep declines in eelgrass biomass in the Gulf of Maine by damaging rhizomes and young plants as they burrow for shelter and dig for prey.
All this is happening as the Gulf of Maine warms faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, creating increasingly hospitable conditions for the green crab to proliferate. In this ecological crisis, Uy and his colleagues saw opportunity.
With help from a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Business Builder grant, Khmer Maine is preparing to launch its own kdam prai, made from locally harvested green crabs. The project has also connected Maine’s Cambodian community with GreenCrab.org, a nonprofit leading a regional effort to mitigate the crabs’ environmental impact by turning them into a food source.
Gobbling up green crabs is part of a broader movement that has also put lionfish, feral pigs, kudzu, and Asian carp on dinner plates and restaurant menus to stanch the spread of invasive species. Joe Roman, a conservation biologist who developed the concept of invasivorism 25 years ago, describes it as “a form of biological control” with the human appetite as the agent of change.
For Marpheen Chann, who founded Khmer Maine in 2018 to unite his community, salted crab offers a way to share a meaningful message while helping to address the green crab problem.
“We are showing how immigrants impact our communities and contribute to culture, economy, and ecology,” Chann says.
Khmer Maine brings in community members…. : Khmer Maine’s Bunly Uy (far left) processes European green crabs for kdam prai with Cambodian elders at Portland’s Fork Food Lab. (Photo credit: Mary Parks / GreenCrab.org)
Invasive and Delicious
It turns out that Uy and Chann weren’t the first to think of pairing green crabs with Cambodian cuisine. Some community elders have been cooking with them for at least a decade, according to Mary Parks, executive director of GreenCrab.org. But their idea took off after a Cambodian New Year celebration in April 2022 when Khmer Maine organized a one-time crab giveaway, hoping to learn more about how people used—or might use—the crustaceans. In just a few hours, more than 1,200 pounds of crab vanished into the hands and homes of eager Cambodian cooks.
“They hold a reminder of home,” Chann says of green crabs. “Some of the grandmothers, the way they look at these crabs, there’s a light in their eyes. They recognize the shape and size of the crab and exactly what it can be used for.”
“Some of the grandmothers, the way they look at these crabs, there’s a light in their eyes.”
Although feedback from the giveaway suggested the Cambodian community wasn’t a suitable wholesale market for fresh crabs, Chann saw potential in a value-added product—especially one that could make the crabs available through Maine’s long winters, when they hide until spring. Khmer Maine received the USDA grant in 2025, securing around $78,000 to create a salted crab product that could address that need. Last fall, Chann and Uy started developing their recipe with support and guidance from some of the community’s elders.
Sokhuon Ou was eager to help. After nearly a decade away from home, she still misses the salted crab she used to eat with her siblings.
“They are the most delicious food,” she says through an interpreter.
During two test batches made at Fork Food Lab, a Portland commercial kitchen and business incubator, a half-dozen elders, including Ou, helped Chann and Uy with the hard work of preparing salted crab, scrubbing sinks full of feisty crabs to douse in the brine. They shared stories and memories in their native Khmer language to pass the time. As soon as Uy opened a bucket of the finished product for packaging, the elders began clamoring for a taste, he says. Then they packaged 500 pounds of crab into vacuum-sealed bags and went home with some samples.
Ou was happy to be surrounded by the pungent aroma from the garlicky fish-sauce brine. She’ll be even happier to have fresh, local kdam prai this summer. The first crabs of the season are only just beginning to emerge, but once the harvest arrives, Chann plans to salt them and give away samples at Seafest, a celebration of Southeast Asian cultures on May 2 in Westbrook, Maine.
As soon as Khmer Maine can secure crabs and build up its supply of kdam prai, it will begin selling flash-frozen quart containers directly to the community from its offices near Portland Harbor and at local events, rather than wholesale. If all goes well, the salted crab may hit the shelves of Portland’s Cambodian grocers. Any revenue will support the organization and its other initiatives, including growing popular herbs like Thai basil for the community.
There will be opportunity to expand if Khmer Maine chooses: Parks has a long list of chefs in the region who have requested samples. And the country’s second-largest Cambodian community resides an hour and a half away in Lowell, Massachusetts, offering another market with an appetite for salted crab.
The Making of a New Market
For the uninitiated, kdam prai can be an acquired taste. Neil Stanton, a harvester in Westport Island, Maine, who has provided green crabs to Khmer Maine, describes it as a stronger, saltier version of shell-on crab, with “a little funky fermentation to it.”
As a member of his town’s shellfish committee, he’s led the effort to protect clam harvesters by trapping green crabs, which can eat up to 40 clams a day. Based on unscientific surveys, Stanton says, the trapping seems to be making a difference, with crab populations dwindling in coves they’ve harvested most. Stanton is struck by the Cambodian community’s enthusiasm for using green crabs as a food source and eager to support the development of a consistent market for the species.
“If anybody can crack the code, all the clammers will start catching them,” Stanton says.
“We finally have something we can fish and fish and fish, and it’s going to be there in the future.”
The development of a culinary market for green crabs could alleviate some of the threat to coastal economies dependent on lobsters, clams, mussels, and oysters. As the Gulf of Maine warms, ocean acidification is complicating shell formation and lobsters are migrating north for cooler climes. In that sense, green crabs represent a new type of abundance, Parks says.
“We’re losing access to so many species,” she says. “We finally have something we can fish and fish and fish, and it’s going to be there in the future.”
Chann and Uy take pride in what they and their collaborators are doing with green crabs, responding to the impact of ecological crisis and showing that their small community can help guide the future of green crab foodways. More than anything, though, they take satisfaction in knowing that they’re providing Portland’s Cambodian community with a taste of home.
“It would bring a big moment of joy if you could access the food that you had eaten when you were young,” Uy says. With green crab season fast approaching, he’s ready to do just that.
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