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.
British 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 Gen Z – inspiring memes as well as all sorts of eccentric recipes, such as the pop star Dua Lipa’s favourite cocktail of pickle juice and Coke. Why? Well, why not? Like a good in-joke, a good meme necessarily 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.
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