Wood, James. “I ate a hot pickle.” The Pistachio Times, 12 May 2025, www.thepistachiotimes/opinion/archive/2025/05/12/i-ate-a-hot-pickle
A hot pickle’s pouch is a lonely place. Its solitary inmate is suspended in juice and forced to stare at a cartoon representation of itself, which serves as a sign for hungry road trippers that vinegary glory awaits them. Though isolated, the pickle’s disconcerting shit-bobbing-in-a-toilet appearance is at least shielded from the outside world, allowing the pickle to put its best foot forward looks-wise.
Mercifully, the pickle doesn’t realize that it’s hideous, instead believing that it resembles the handsome cartoon on the pouch.
Some experts believe we should provide it with a mirror. The thinking is that the pickle might put on a tasteful polo or a funny little hat, which would go a long way in concealing its lumpiness. However, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t know how to dress, as the pickle has been naked its whole life.
It also may reject the idea of clothing entirely: this would force the pickle to look at its lumpy self all day, which could easily give the poor pickle body dysmorphia.
The pickle also compensates for a lack of purpose by committing to an obnoxious nihilistic attitude, although it’s not completely unwarranted. A hot pickle’s meaning is quite elusive, after all. It can’t reproduce because the pickling process sterilizes it; when its seeds are catapulted out of some animal’s sphincter, they will land unceremoniously on the ground, and will be promptly rejected by the soil.
And though we often anthropomorphize food happily jumping into our mouths, being eaten is quite depressing as a meaning for one’s life. Pretending that gobblin’ something down is more than just the cold calculus of survival flippantly ignores the hot pickle’s desire as something that does not want to be eaten thank-you-very-much.
Imagine if God came down and said that your whole purpose was to be masticated in someone’s gross mouth and then violently thrown down their greasy gullet, landing near a festering ulcer which is the last thing you see as your body is dissolved into microscopic chunks of denatured protein.
You would be like what the hell, God. That’s a bummer.
And then God would be like well now you know what it feels like to be a pickle.
And then you would be like what the hell does that even mean. Pickles don’t have consciousness. If this is a parable it’s certainly a misguided one.
And then God wouldn’t explain himself any further.
The taste of a hot pickle is also an abomination. At first, the pickle is shockingly bland; a low-calorie husk which tries to masquerade as flavorful through campy packaging. Roughly seven seconds after putting the hot pickle in your mouth, however, an unholy bitterness is unleashed similar in quality to the juice which pools at the bottom of Burger King dumpsters.
It’s a defense mechanism. Even though the pickle is lumpy, stinky, malformed, purposeless and depressed, it still fights to live a little bit longer, even as its innards are trashed around.
You may find yourself in middle America, either desperate or curious, eyeing up a hot pickle. With all sincerity, please do not bother the hot pickle. Let it carry out the rest of its days in tranquility, holding out hope for freedom beyond the confines of its plastic prison.