Neophilia and Neophobia

Those are the terms food writer and former patent attorney Jeffrey Steingarten uses to describe the omnivore's predicament. "The tricky part of being an omnivore," he writes "is that we are always in danger of poisoning ourselves. Catfish have taste buds on their whiskers, but we are not so lucky. Instead we are born with a cautious ambivalence toward novel foods, a precarious balance between neophilia and neophobia." He writes this in the Introduction to his book The Man Who Ate Everything, in which he chronicles his journey to overcome his own food phobias (including all desserts in Indian restaurants, with which I have to agree, Squid Boy's homage to tapioca nothwithstanding). If you've seen Steingarten in his role as curmudgeonly judge on Iron Chef America, you won't be surprised that he undertakes this project in part because he's appalled at how accepted peoples' food issues have become. "People should be deeply ashamed of the irrational food phobias that keep them from sharing food with each other. Instead, they have become proud and isolated, arrogant and aggressively misinformed."

Too cranky, or right on the money? Do we have to be tolerant of the (food) intolerant?