CHIMPANZEES are on their way to becoming half-decent chefs. Captive chimps in
Madrid have begun to purée their own fruits and vegetables, in what looks
like the first case of an ape transforming food to improve its taste and
texture.
Chimps use all sorts of clever techniques to obtain food, such as fishing
termites out of mounds with sticks and bashing palm nuts open with rocks. But
these tricks do not alter the quality of the food. “These are not cases of
transformation of food in the human way,” says Samuel Fernández-Carriba,
a primatologist at the Universidad Autónoma…
