FEED your mind: The evolutionary roots of human food cognition

Research on food cognition has largely overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from the environment in which our ancestors lived. When foraging for food in wild environments, our ancestors had to distinguish edible food resources from myriad inedible and potentially toxic entities. In contrast, in most cultures today, many decisions about food are made during a trip to the grocery store or a meal at a restaurant, where we might ask ourselves: Is this item healthy? but certainly not: Is this item edible or toxic? Here we argue that the scope of the problem humans faced with respect to food included navigating through wild environments to Find candidate food items, Evaluating the nutritional benefits of the potential foods, Excluding the costs of making a mistake and consuming a harmful food item, and Deciding which food items to ingest and include in their diet. We call this the FEED problem and argue that it provides an organizing framework for thinking about the wide array of cognitive processes involved in human food psychology. The FEED problem can also be used as a generative theory to produce new testable empirical predictions about what cognitive mechanisms drive our modern food behaviors and provides a roadmap for future research in the field of food cognition.