George ILIEV
If something looks unfamiliar, it does not get eaten. Animals avoid eating unfamiliar berries or insects for two reasons: "dietary wariness" (fear of eating something poisonous) and "apostatic predation" (difficulty to spot prey that looks too different).
Humans in the supermarket do not need to worry about poisonous berries or insects, though high fat or sugar content may be almost equally undesirable characteristics of a food product. On the other hand, apostatic predation is something consumers often fall victim to, e.g. when unsuccessfully hunting for a familiar product whose package has been changed by the manufacturer.
This is where advertising steps in: by creating awareness for a cereal product, a commercial makes it both acceptable (i.e. reassuring that it is not harmful) and easy to spot among the packages of fried crickets and roasted beetles that British supermarkets regularly stock up. Looking too different and unfamiliar would help a package of cornflakes hang on to the supermarket shelf not for the love of marketing but for evolutionary reasons.
