The fundamental element on which the “omnivore’s anxiety” (as I have defined it) is focused, is the act of incorporation, i.e. the action in which we send a food across the frontier between the world and the self, between “outside” and “inside” our body (Rozin and Fallon, 1981). This action is both banal and fraught with potentially irreversible consequences. To incorporate a food is, in both real and imaginary terms; to incorporation is a basis of identity. The German saying, “Man ist, was man isst” (you are what you eat ), is literally, biologically true; the food we absorb provides not only the energy our body consumes but the very substance of the body, inasmuch as it helps to maintain the biochemical composition of the organism.