The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

(“The whole of nature,” wrote the English author William Ralph Inge, “is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.”)

Whenever they encounter a potential new food they find themselves torn between two conflicting emotions unknown to the specialist eater, each with its own biological rationale: neophobia, a sensible fear of ingesting anything new, and neophilia, a risky but necessary openness to new tastes.