If you’re a pickle lover, there’s no question: Every year is ‘pickle year’. Heck, every day is ‘pickle day’. But 2024 saw the humble dill pickle showered with media and cult attention as never before. And some observers expect the pickle to continue ‘hot’ in 2025…
I can’t think of a week that went by last year without some reference in the Foodsphere to the ubiq-uitous Dill Pickle. We saw scads of ‘new pickle recipes’, and surprising claims for the pickle’s health-iness as a fermented food. But also an avalanche of pickle novelty ‘applications’ that kept us giggling almost non-stop.
Something for everyone?
It seems everybody wanted to get on the pickle bandwagon, in some way or another. And ‘pickle wat-chers’ found themselves overwhelmed by the surge in interest.
Social media influencers declared ‘Pickle Mania’ viral and trending: “At the intersection of health and edginess, traditionalism and hipsterism, global culture and the American stomach, the pickle in 2024 found itself caught in a mealstrom of [attention] just as its food-as-fetish-object cousins — bacon and ranch dressing, notably — experienced in years past,” AP’s Ted Anthony noted in a year-end look-back.
And it wasn’t just humans who joined the fray. Petco declared pickles a ‘thing’ for pets, with a promo-tion featuring no fewer than 26 different pickle-themed toys for dogs and cats.
‘Pickle’ everything
2024 saw pickle pundits pushing their fave snack every which way they could think of. How often have you found yourself in the mood for…
- A Pickle Pizza? (See photo, top of page.)
- Pickle-flavored gummy vitamins?
- A pickle Holiday wreath?
- A Pickleback bar shot?
- Or a non-alcoholic, icy cold Pickle Juice and Dr. Pepper?
Pickle maker HJ Heinz even sponsred, “a summer festival called Picklesburgh that drew aficionados of the sour and the puckery from several states away for copious amounts of pickle beer washed down by brine, or vice versa,” Anthony noted.
Why pickles?
“Prepared Foods, an industry newsletter, said it outright in September: ‘The pickle obsession is at an all-time high’.”
But why pickles?
“It’s been a scary few years for a lot of people. In 2024 we needed something we could agree on. Maybe it [was] pickles,” says Alex Plakias, an associate professor of Food philosophy at Hamilton College in New York.
“I was surprised at how the pickle could be all things to all people,” Plakias continues. “All these different food identities in 2024, and no matter who you think of, pickles can be for them.”
John Patterson, founder of Pittsburgh Pickle, enthuses: “I realized that a cucumber is a blank slate, and you get to paint it with all kinds of different brines and spices and salts and sugars.”
But he’s also something of a pickle philosopher: “A pickle is something you can rely on and count on,” he says. “A pickle is always funny, for some reason. A pickle is never nefarious or mean. It’s a peace-ful, wholesome business to be in.”
My take
The consensus seems to be, as Patterson puts it: “It’s almost like God intended [cucumbers] to be pickled.”
But popular opinion on the pickle remains painfully polarized…
My questions to you:
Are you a pickle popularist, like food and culture researcher Nora Rubel, who insists, “You can get pickle everything now. This is really my time.”
Or do you agree with popular food website Delish, which begs, “Can we give pickles a break in 2025? They’re tired. And we’re tired for them.”
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.