From 2015... The Evolutionary Psychology of Food Intake and Choice... Food choice is central in much of human behavior

From 2015... The Evolutionary Psychology of Food Intake and Choice. Chapter in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2015. 10.1002/9781119125563.evpsych106

Abstract: Food choice plays a fundamental role in both biological and cultural evolution. As social generalists eating a wide range of foods, humans have faced two great problems in their evolution: how to figure out what is toxic and what is nutritive—the omnivore's dilemma—and how to coordinate the learned knowledge of multiple individuals to succeed in omnivorous food selection. Generalists like humans and rats find food sources by searching and deciding how long to stay with particular sources (as studied in the optimal foraging literature), and choose which particular foods to eat on the basis of evolved preferences, in particular for sweet tastes and fatty textures, and evolved learning abilities, including social copying and learned taste aversions.The cultural evolution of the use of many basic foods such as corn, milk, and meat in different cuisines has engaged a number of genetically programmed human predispositions, including the fat and sweet preferences. The basic emotion of disgust was originally related to the food system, but through cultural preadaptation has come to be involved with many other domains of human life. Given its centrality in much of human behavior, food choice should take a more prominent place in evolutionary psychology.