There are plenty more fish in the sea

Beyond its implications for health — and there are many, given the ballooning global obesity crisis — the restricted diet of the contemporary human blunts the very evolutionary edge that helped ensure Homo sapiens’ success.

2 min readOct 14, 2026 06:15 AM IST First published on: Oct 14, 2026 at 06:15 AM IST

If being omnivorous gave human beings an advantage in the high-stakes game of evolution, what is to be made of the growing evidence that the species’ palate has, in this age of plenty, narrowed rather than expanded? Consider, for example, the British palate, which according to research published this week in People and Nature, enjoys so little of what it once prized that fish and seafood consumption has effectively been reduced to a small group of fish. Gone are the plaice, herring and oysters, replaced almost entirely by the “Big Five”: Cod, haddock, salmon, prawns and tuna.

This is a paradox of the modern age, where a mindboggling diversity prevails everywhere, from fashion and pastimes to media and medicines, but the dinner plate — whether one is in New Delhi or New York — looks increasingly the same. There is of course, as there always is in the tangled web of the global economy, a range of reasons, including the dominance of monocultures. Humans now get the bulk of their calories from just eight crops: Rice, wheat, maize, potatoes, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar.

Beyond its implications for health — and there are many, given the ballooning global obesity crisis — the restricted diet of the contemporary human blunts the very evolutionary edge that helped ensure Homo sapiens’ success. The lessons are clear, especially in light of the monoculture-related food disasters of the modern age, such as the great banana epidemic that once wiped out entire plantations in South and Central America or the African swine fever that swept through Asia in 2018, leading to the culling of millions of pigs and disruption of the global food supply: There are plenty of fish in the sea, if only humans would pick a wider variety.