This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.

Food has been on my mind a lot lately. When it comes down to it, I think

what's for dinner is actually one of the most profound and important questions there is.

What we eat doesn't just impact our health. Our world is shaped by food, the food we eat now and the food our ancestors ate in the

past. So what did they eat? How did they get it? What impacted their food choices or the foods

available to them have on the way our species evolved? Did eating lots of meat and smashing the marrow out of bones give us our big brains?

How did the tough seeds or soft fruits gathered by our ancestors make us who we are right now?

These are some of the fundamental questions in the study of human evolution.

So today's episode is all about food. Well, one kind of food anyway.

So have you eaten termites and what are they like? Turmites are delicious. I've eaten them in South

Africa. I've eaten them straight out of the mound and then when you eat them straight out of the

mound to me, they just tasted like dirt, because you eat more dirt.

But in the community I was working with in South Africa, it's up in the northern province of Limpopo.

They would harvest these macrotermy soldiers, clean off the dirt, boil them just very shortly for just what felt like a minute with some salt, they tasted just like popcorn.

I could have sat there and ate a whole bucket of these termites.

That's Julie Lesnick.

She's a Leaky Foundation grantee who initially went to grad school to study ancient tool use.

In her studies, she saw how chimpanzees use sticks to catch and eat termites.

She thought about the fact that these chimps had taught themselves to do this.

They made and used tools just to get to termites.

That made her realize what an important food source they were. And she wanted to learn more.

Now Lesnik is a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit,

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