Pickles are having a moment

If something can be squeezed into a jar with brine, Polish grandmas will do it. Walk into the kitchen of the average babcia and you’ll see jars lining the shelves filled with mysterious experiments, as if in an old-fashioned Slavic science lab. Here are pickled cucumbers, pickled peppers, pickled mushrooms, pickled cabbage, and pickled beetroot. Babcia knows that pickles are tasty, cheap, versatile and great for your health. Dziadek (Grandpa) knows that they are great with vodka.

Zoomers love pickles as well. Pickles, according to the website Vox, are among 2025’s “hottest foods.” McDonald’s has even cashed in on the fad with an advertisement showing a husband affectionately donating pickles from his burger to his wife.

The avocado was the defining food of millennials, spawning endless mocking articles about young people wasting their money on a fashionable plant-based breakfast. Pickles have become a defining food of Generation Z, inspiring memes as well as all sorts of eccentric recipes, such as the pop star Dua Lipa’s favorite cocktail of pickle juice and Coke. Why? Well, why not? Like a good in-joke, a good meme resists explanation. But there are some cultural implications to be teased out. Gen Z, considered broadly, loves the DIY aesthetic. Many of their entertainers stepped into the mainstream from their bedrooms, enjoying an age where “content creation,” in its different visual and audio forms, can be mastered at home. Sadly, zoomers also spent some of their formative years in lockdown, trying to entertain themselves from behind closed doors. Pickling was the sort of cheap and cheerful experiment that could make those long and boring housebound days less grim.

Gen Z is also sensitive about gut health. The mysterious microbiome, and the toll that physical and mental stressors take on it, has become an important feature of online discourse. Pickles, I am told, are great for the gut. I have no idea if this is actually true — nutrition science often seems to be a form of modern shamanism — but it is at least a comforting thought. (Kefir and kombucha are popular with zoomers for much the same reason.)

Finally, pickles appeal to young people because they are not obviously appealing. Almost everyone enjoys a pizza or an ice cream. A shot of pickle juice, with all its salty goodness, is a less easily explicable pleasure. Zoomers — like all young people before them, and all young people to come — want to be different.

It would be nice to think that in its own small way, the pickle craze reflects a real and lasting attraction to self-reliance and simplicity, and to what is capable of being conserved. But it might just as plausibly reflect enthusiasm for a snack that looks a little like a penis. Still, we could all use a bit more of the spirit of a Polish grandma — and I hope to some extent the pickle represents Gen Z taking power back into its brine-splattered hands.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.