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huge number of nutritive or dangerous 
substances that the omnivore encoun- 
ters. The omnivore must have another 
type of system for identifying and eval- 
uating these many substances; this is 
especially important because of the 
high incidence of toxic substances in 
the natural world. 
Without an innate food recognition 
system, how does the generalist man- 
age? Although some mammalian om- 
nivores, including humans, do have 
minimal preprogrammed guidelines 
(approach to sweet tastes and avoid- 
ance of bitter tastes), individual ex- 
perience predominates in the evalu- 
ation of foods. And of course humans 
have the mediation of culture, which 
includes accumulated knowledge 
about valuable and dangerous sub- 
stances and methods for treating cer- 
tain items that, once detoxified, are 
nutritionally beneficial. 
Of all behavior, eating is surely the 
most intimate because it involves the 
irrevocable incorporation of things 
into the body; once past the lips and 
down the gullet the substance becomes 
at least cognitively a part of the or- 
ganism. Such an interaction must be 
both intensely satisfying and ex- 
tremely threatening. Strong, positive, 
affective responses accompany eating, 
while, when new foods are involved, 
the possibility of bodily harm pro- 
motes fear and hesitation. This 
approach-avoidance conflict is one as- 
pect of the omnivore’s dilemma. Try- 
ing new foods is at the core of 
omnivorousness, but so is being wary 
of them. A delayed, cautious, and gin- 
gerly sampling of new foods is com- 
mon in a number of omnivorous spe- 
cies. 
Within the familiarity of one’s cul- 
ture the fear side of eating is attenu- 
ated. But when one leaves the safety 
of the home environment and travels 
to far and exotic places, the conflict 
appears: there is an interest in new 
foods and a simultaneous fear of eat- 
ing them, a conflict frequently re- 
solved by restricting eating to the safe 
haven of the Cairo Hilton or a Mac- 
Donald’s in Bangkok. (Indeed, the uni- 
formity and total predictability of the 
fast-food chains may be a response 
to this side of the omnivore’s di- 
lemma.) A person may both seek and 
withdraw from exotic foods, and the 
balance may shift in different indi- 
viduals and in different circumstances. 
Although the preference for a new 
food increases the more times it is 
experienced without negative conse- 
quences, this may be, at least partially, 
a result of the dissipation of fear of 
new things. However, extensive expo- 
sure may also lead to boredom and 
rejection. This encourages the omni- 
vore to continue exploring new food 
sources and discourages heavy reli- 
ance on one food. And so we have 
a second aspect of the omnivore’s di- 
lemma, which can now be seen as 
twofold: (1) curiosity about new foods 
versus fear of new foods and (2) the 
satisfaction with familiar food versus 
the boredom that overexposure can 
produce. 
It is our belief that the widespread 
human tendency to season foods with 
recurrent, predictable combinations of 
flavoring ingredients can be seen as 
a cultural response to the omnivore’s 
dilemma. The ambivalence of eating, 
the pleasure-fear balance, depends on 
the familiarity of the food. Reliably 
clothing the food in a distinctive and 
familiar flavor can tip the balance to 
the side of pleasure: it provides a taste 
that has always been safe and enjoy- 
able, that is associated with satiety 
and the appropriate social context. 
The flavor furnishes a familiar frame 
for the food of a culture, passed along 
from generation to generation. 
If the approach-avoidance conflict 
can be significantly reduced by the 
use of familiar, traditional flavors, it 
might well be an adaptive means of 
disseminating a nutritious, new food 
staple within a culture. By labeling 
a food with the appropriate flavor, 
it is “certified,” as it were, as familiar 
and safe to eat. Having discovered 
the safety and nutritional value of a 
new food through personal experience 
or through information received from 
outside, the pioneer “sampler” within 
a culture could announce its accept- 
ability by treating it as a traditional 
food, preparing it with familiar flavor 
principles and cooking techniques. In- 
deed, Parmentier, the eighteenth-cen- 
tury French agriculturist, did just this 
in order to persuade the French people 
to accept the potato, a valuable food 
staple brought from the New World. 
The French would have nothing to 
do with this new food until Parmentier 
showed them how to prepare it in tra- 
ditional ways and with familiar sea- 
sonings: butter, cheese, herbs. The 
strategy worked, and the potato has 
risen in the French culinary repertoire 
from initial rejection to enormous pop- 
ularity. 
We don’t know very much about 
how, on the individual level, new foods 
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