These two contradictory characteristic entail equally contradictory consequences; hence the omnivore’s paradox. On the one hand, needing variety, the omnivore is inclined towards diversification, innovation, exploration and change, which can be careful, mistrustful, ‘conservative’ in its eating: any new, unknown food is a potential danger. The omnivore’s paradox lies in the tension, the oscillation between the two poles of neophobia (prudence, fear of the unknown, resistance to change) and neophilia (the tendency to explore, the need for change, novelty, variety). Every omnivore, and man in particular, is subject to kind of Batesonian double bind between the familiar and the unknown, monotony and change, security and variety. There is perhaps a fundamental anxiety in man’s relationship to his foods, but also and more importantly from the tension between the two contradictory and equally constraining imperatives of the omnivore’s double bind.