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

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

Or perhaps it was just a couple weeks ago, when Instagram chef itsmejuliette (no stranger to online pickle activities) posted a cheeky challenge on her “cooking with no rules” feed: “this is your sign to surprise your neighbor with a 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 pickle in 2024 found itself caught in a mealstrom of words like “viral” and “trending” just as its food-as-fetish-object cousins — bacon and ranch dressing, notably — experienced in years past. Prepared Foods, an industry newsletter, said it outright in September: “The pickle obsession is at an all-time high.”

Tangy Pickle Doritos. Grill Mates Dill Pickle Seasoning for your steak. Portable pouches of pickles. Pickle mayonnaise, pickle hummus, pickle cookies, pickle gummies. Spicy pickle challenges. Pickleback shots at the bar. Pickle juice and Dr. Pepper, heaven help us. Corn puffs colored and flavored like pickles and called, naturally, Pickle Balls. In Pittsburgh, the cradle of the modern American pickle (talkin’ to you, H.J. Heinz), a summer festival called Picklesburgh that draws aficionados of the sour and the puckery from several states away for copious amounts of pickle beer washed down by brine, or vice versa.

As 2025 begins, two possible conclusions present themselves. First: The previously nobrow pickle has embedded its sour self at the nucleus of the American gastro-zeitgeist for the foreseeable future. Second: This maybe has played itself out, and the pickle has (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 would know. She is a curator and expert on the history of the Heinz company for the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, a couple miles downriver from this industrial borough where Henry J. Heinz churned out his first packaged pickles in the 19th century.

Indeed, pickles are a $3.1 billion annual market in the United States and growing consistently.

Let’s dispense with the obvious hanging question. In short: Sour nation, sour mood, sour foods? Maybe just a little.

“It’s been a scary few years for a lot of 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 at how the pickle could be all things to all people,” says Plakias, whose most recent book is about awkwardness. “All these different food identities in 2024, and no matter who you think of, pickles can be for them.”

To see how that might have happened, we can look to the potent pathways of marketing and social media.

The garden-variety American cucumber pickle is crunchy and sour, with an aggressive taste of its own but a clear elasticity that accommodates other “flavor profiles” (Ghost pepper pickles! Garlic pickles! Horseradish pickles! Bread and butter chips!). They’re also absurdly low fat — the rare food trend that’s not outright bad for you — and some offer the probiotic benefits of fermentation. Key marketing points all.

From a positioning perspective, somehow the pickle exists at the crossroads of homey-slash-traditional (Mom, Lower East Side, preserves, harvests) and edgy-slash-slightly subversive (sour, intense flavors, startup 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 get to paint it with all kinds of different brines and spices and salts and sugars,” says John Patterson, who founded Pittsburgh Pickle with his brothers out of a church kitchen a decade ago.

“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 peaceful, wholesome business to be in.”

(Of the cucumber itself, he has this to say: “It’s almost like God intended them to be pickled.”)

The pickle is also, let’s be candid, usually green and bumpy and intrinsically unattractive. That means even social-video newbies don’t need precision lighting to crank out reasonably compelling pickle content.

Credit — or blame — TikTok for some of the frenzy. Watching the meticulous chronicling of pickle-cake baking, pickle-wreath making and pickle-pizza crafting, you get the sense the social platform was made as much for dills as for dancing. Pickle videos there regularly top 2 million viewers, and as of this week TikTok reported more than 251 million pieces of pickle content for the snacking.

Then there is the Great Glickle Surge of 2024 — another social media oddity that involves someone pouring “edible glitter” (who knew?) into a jar of pickles and making “glickles” — ostensibly a sexier, blingier, even Instagrammier version of pickles (again, who knew?).

Finally, COVID likely played a pivotal role. After years of rising locavore ethos, the pandemic’s forced inward focus in 2020 and 2021 led many Americans to revisit DIY approaches to food, including baking sourdough bread and, yes, pickling things.