Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Leakey

Leakey’s line looks like a tame dietary note until you hear the quiet provocation inside it: stop romanticizing nature. “To begin with” is doing work. It frames nutrition not as a lifestyle choice but as the baseline condition for everything else we like to project onto primates - intelligence, social bonds, even “gentleness.” He’s stripping the story back to metabolism.

The kicker is “but insects as well.” That “as well” punctures the Edenic image of primates as pure fruit-eaters in a lush, benevolent forest. Insects are messy, often invisible, and undeniably animal. Bringing them into the menu insists on omnivory, on opportunism, on the fact that survival is frequently about protein, not poetry. It’s also a subtle corrective to the way modern environmental rhetoric can slide into soft-focus moralism: nature isn’t an aesthetic; it’s an economy.

Context matters. Leakey spent his life arguing that conservation has to be anchored in ecology and evolution, not sentiment. Read through that lens, the quote functions as a miniature manifesto against “Disneyfied” wilderness narratives that can mislead policy and public expectations. If primates - our closest relatives - thrive on varied, sometimes unpalatable resources, then ecosystems can’t be protected by preserving a postcard scene. They’re networks of dependencies, including the small, ignored creatures people rarely campaign for.

Intent-wise, he’s reminding us that biodiversity isn’t just charismatic megafauna. It’s also the crunch of insects, the unglamorous link that keeps bodies alive and, by extension, makes culture possible at all.