I remember reading that some hunter-gatherers have diet breadth entirely set by the calorie per hour return rate: take the calories and time expended to acquire the food (eg effort to chase prey) against the calorie density of the food to get the caloric return rate, and compare that to the average expected calories per hour of continuing to look for some other food. Humans will include every food in their diet for which making an effort to go after that food has a higher expected return than continuing to search for something else, ie they’ll maximise variety in order to get calories faster. I can’t find the citation for it right now though. (Also I apologise if that explanation was garbled, it’s 2am)
You may find this source interesting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23148
I remember reading that some hunter-gatherers have diet breadth entirely set by the calorie per hour return rate: take the calories and time expended to acquire the food (eg effort to chase prey) against the calorie density of the food to get the caloric return rate, and compare that to the average expected calories per hour of continuing to look for some other food. Humans will include every food in their diet for which making an effort to go after that food has a higher expected return than continuing to search for something else, ie they’ll maximise variety in order to get calories faster. I can’t find the citation for it right now though. (Also I apologise if that explanation was garbled, it’s 2am)