Guilty as charged.

Don't get me started on "authentic" Cajun food, which doesn't exist in the SF Bay Area, or "authentic" Thai food, which probably does, which you can passably get if you ask them to make it authentic-ly spicy.

It's a pet peeve of mine that foreign cuisines invariably are modified to suit local tastes. I understand it from a business perspective (greater acceptance = greater revenue), but it still irks me to call it "authentic." Perhaps "fusion" is a better moniker.

I desire to "expand" my taste buds just as much as I want to expand my mind. There are many foods that I enjoy today that I didn't enjoy before (sushi, anyone?) because I dared to do this.

I'd rather expand my tastes and learn to appreciate new foods than modify all "foreign" foods to suit my tastes (or should I say the limited range of tastes I had 15 years ago).