Trying a food you’ve avoided for years is low stakes practice for trying everything else.

The pattern you use for small refusals is the same one you use for large ones. Avoiding something for years is usually built on one bad experience and a story you repeated until it was a fact about you, which is how people end up never applying or never asking. A fork is a cheap place to test whether the story still holds.

Order the thing you always skip, or let somebody put it on your plate, and give it a real try. Notice how fast the dread shrinks once it is in front of you. Then look for the same shape somewhere it matters more.