It was September 2023, and a certain sweatshirt wouldn’t leave me alone. It was heather gray with a grid of 12 pickle jars on it, and it showed up on my TikTok feed with what I’d consider astonishing frequency, as in, multiple times an hour.

Between ads for the pickle sweatshirt on TikTok Shop, I saw young people drinking the brine of their pickle juice, reviewing various grocery store pickles, putting edible glitter into a pickle jar and shaking it like a snowglobe, and doing the “pickle challenge” by sticking dill pickles in chamoy, Tajin, and sour candy powder so that they became bright red and spicy. Even Dua Lipa was putting pickle juice in her Diet Coke. Why are all these people so obsessed with pickles? I wondered, a thought immediately followed by a chilling realization: I was witnessing a new generation discover its version of the avocado.

For reasons that have less to do with millennials and more to do with lifted import restrictions, improved production techniques, and the explosion of a little fast-casual chain called Chipotle, US avocado consumption skyrocketed at the dawn of the 21st century. Avocados were healthy, they were versatile, and they were also more expensive than most produce, which made them feel a tiny bit luxurious. It wasn’t until 2017, when an Australian real estate mogul blamed young people’s inability to afford homes on spending too much on avocado toast that millennials became forever linked to the fatty green fruit. Avocados, even more so than other au courant superfoods like kale, quinoa, or açaí, illustrated something about the generation: specifically, that our appetite for small pleasures would ultimately bring about our doom.

What then, do pickles say about Gen Z? Pickles are weird. They’re inherently funny because they look like the male sex organ if it was green. Pickles are good for you, and specifically good for your gut, the health obsession of the moment. Like avocados, they are extraordinarily versatile. They pair well with other contemporary food trends like dirty martinis and canned cocktails, and fit right in with aesthetically pleasing butter boards and “girl dinner” spreads. Unlike avocados, however, they’re cheap. (In the age of Shein, Temu, and dupes for everything, perhaps pickles are a sign Gen Z has learned from our lessons: If you ever want to own property, don’t go broke on produce.)

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Andrea Hernández, founder of the food and beverage trend newsletter Snaxshot, traces the rise of the pickle on social media to the early days of Covid, when people were stuck at home and filming social media content about life under lockdown. It was boredom and a........

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