The omnivore's dilemma is a psychological burden, not just a biological fact

Pollan borrows the term omnivore's dilemma from research on how omnivorous animals like rats navigate a world where almost anything might be food, but not everything is safe to eat. Unlike a koala, which never has to wonder whether something is edible, an omnivore must constantly evaluate novel potential foods — a cognitively expensive, anxiety-inducing task.

Humans solved this ancestrally with culture: cuisines, cooking traditions, and food taboos that encode generations of trial-and-error about what's safe and nourishing, sparing each individual from re-deriving that knowledge from scratch. A cuisine is, in effect, an inherited answer to the omnivore's dilemma.

Pollan's provocation is that modern industrial food has stripped away this cultural scaffolding faster than we've built new judgment to replace it — leaving us omnivores again facing the ancestral anxiety, but now in a supermarket aisle instead of a forest, confronted by ingredient lists instead of unfamiliar berries.

Takeaway: the confusion you feel in the cereal aisle is a very old animal instinct, just relocated to a very new environment.