Dill of a lifetime? As US endures its own sour patch, the pickle dominated 2024

SHARPSBURG, Pa. — When did we know for sure?

Was it April when Nature Made introduced its product? Pickle flavored gummy vitamins? Was it November, when Petco’s “Pickle Mania” promotion offered 26 different pickle-themed toys for dogs and cats? Perhaps it was the December day when a food scientist was heard to say, “Everyone can see that their needs are met by pickles.”

Or maybe it was just a few weeks ago, when Instagram chef itsmejuliette (no stranger to online pickle activities) posted a cheeky challenge to her “cooking without rules” feed: “This is your cue to surprise your neighbor with An pickle wreath.” More than 70,000 people liked her style, or at least her post.

At the intersection of health and edginess, traditionalism and hipsterism, global culture and the American stomach, the 2024 pickle got caught in a maelstrom of words like “viral” and “trending,” just like its food-as-fetish object -cousins. – bacon and ranch dressing, specifically – experienced in recent years. Prepare food, an industry newsletter, put it bluntly in September: “The pickle obsession is at an all-time high.”

Spicy Pickle Doritos. Grill Mates Dill Pickle Seasoning for your steak. Portable pickle bags. Pickle mayonnaise, pickle hummus, pickle cookies, pickle gummies. Spicy pickle challenges. Pickleback recordings at the bar. Pickle juice and Dr. Pepper, heaven help us. Corn puffs colored and flavored like pickles and of course called Pickle Balls. In Pittsburgh, the birthplace of the modern American pickle (talking to you, HJ Heinz), a summer festival called Picklesburgh that draws sour and puckery enthusiasts from several states for copious amounts of pickle beer washed down with brine, or vice versa.

As 2025 begins, two possible conclusions present themselves. First off: the formerly nobrow pickle has has embedded its sour self at the core of the American gastrozeitgeist for the foreseeable future. Second, this may have played out and the pickle (to mix a metaphor) jumped the shark.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

“I think pickling in general has had a resurgence,” says Emily Ruby, who knows. She is a curator and expert on Heinz company history for the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, a few miles downstream from this industrial part of town where Henry J. Heinz produced his first packaged pickles in the 19th century. Pickles are now a $3.1 billion annual market in the United States and growing steadily.

Let’s leave the obvious hanging question. In short: sour nation, sour mood, acidic foods? Maybe just a little bit.

“It has been a scary few years for many people. In 2024, we needed something we could agree on. Maybe it’s pickles,” says Alex Plakias, an associate professor at Hamilton College in New York who teaches the philosophy of food.

“I was surprised how the pickle could mean everything to everyone,” says Plakias, whose most recent book is about clumsiness. “All these different food identities in 2024, and whoever you think of, pickles could be for them.”

To see how that could have happened, we can look to the powerful avenues of marketing and social media.

The garden variety American cucumber pickle is crunchy and tart, with an aggressive flavor on its own, but a distinct elasticity that can accommodate other “flavor profiles” (Ghost Pepper Pickles! Garlic Pickles! Horseradish Pickles! Bread and Butter Chips!). They’re also absurdly low in fat—the rare food trend that isn’t exactly bad for you—and some offer the probiotic benefits of fermentation. All important marketing points.

From a positioning perspective, the pickle somehow finds itself at the intersection of homey-traditional (Mom, Lower East Side, canning, harvesting) and sharp-slash-slightly subversive (sour, intense flavors, start-up pickle factories in reclaimed industrial neighborhoods) .

“It’s not like I come from a long line of picklers. But I realized that a cucumber is a blank slate and you can paint it with all kinds of brines, spices, salts and sugars,” says John Patterson, who founded Pittsburgh Pickle with his brothers from a church kitchen a decade ago.

“A pickle is something you can trust and count on,” he says. “A pickle is always funny for some reason. A pickle is never nefarious or mean. It is a peaceful, healthy business to work in.”

(He says this about the cucumber itself: “It’s almost as if God intended them to be pickled.”)

The pickle is also, let’s face it, mostly green and bumpy and intrinsically unappealing. That means even newcomers to social video don’t need precision lighting to produce reasonably compelling pickle content.

Give TikTok credit – or blame – for some of the frenzy. Watching the painstaking chronicle of baking pickle pies, making pickle wreaths, and making pickle pizzas, you get the feeling that the social platform was created both for dill and for dancing. Pickle videos there regularly reach 2 million viewers, and as of this week, TikTok reported more than 251 million pieces of pickle snack content.

Then there is the Big One Glik The Wave of 2024 – another social media oddity where someone pours “edible glitter” (who knew?) into a jar of pickles and makes “glickles” – ostensibly a sexier, blingier, even Instagrammier version of pickles (again, who knew?) .

Finally, COVID likely played a crucial role. After years of increasing locavore ethos, the forced inward focus of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 led many Americans to reexamine their DIY approach to food, including baking sourdough bread and, yes, pickling things . It’s what Nora Rubel, who researches food and culture, calls “an embrace of grandmothercore culture” by, well, grandchildren. “Gen Z takes pickles as their thing. This is the new avocado toast,” said Rubel, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Rochester.

“Pickles are also pretty funny. They’re just a bit wacky. You can make a lot of puns about pickles. The flavor is intense, but there is also a kind of silliness in it,” says Rubel. (She was also heard saying, “The sweet pickle is something that is very deceptive and disturbing to me.”)

If you see a common thread emerging, it is this – not entirely new, but worth repeating: packaged food is no longer positioned solely as something to eat. Instead, like the most immersive restaurants these days, it often presents itself as a multimedia experience – something to talk about and enjoy, to join like-minded communities, to incorporate into your own personality. Lifestyle pickles, so to speak.

“It symbolizes how we interact with food in everyday life and with each other in 2024,” says MinJi (MJ) Kim, assistant professor of communications at Flagler College in Florida, who studies how media influences people’s food choices.

“Acid has duality. When milk, meat or vegetables develop a sour smell, it indicates spoilage. It is a natural warning system. We equate sourness with risk,” says Kim. “On the other hand, when sourness is intentional – lemons, cider vinegar, Greek yogurt – it becomes a sign of health and attractiveness. It shifts the perception of sourness from risk to something acceptable.”

There you have it: sourness as acceptable, delicious, even worthy of obsession.

So as the popularity of pickleball—which has no direct connection—continues to rise, as fried pickles transcend their novelty status and become bar staples across the country, and as someone’s pet plays with one of 26 pickle holiday toys, let’s we leave you alone. with two dueling thoughts as America makes its way into a new year.

From Rubel this: “You can now pickle everything. This is really my time.”

And from the food website Delish this: “Can we give pickles a break in 2025? They’re tired. And we’re tired for them.”

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Ted Anthony, director of new stories and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, writes regularly about food.