The salty, briny, lemony, garlicky rise of 'pick me' foods
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.)
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 desire to experiment, she says, that led people to confess that they loved to drink the brine of the pickle jars in the back of their fridges or bring viewers along for taste tests. Or, to put it more bluntly, 'People were playing around with TikTok clickbait.'
Soon enough, influencers were making pickle wreaths, brands were releasing pickle-flavored gummy vitamins, hard seltzers, sparkling waters, Doritos, Goldfish, and Mountain Dew. At the end of 2024, Pinterest listed 'pickle fix' as one of the top trend predictions for 2025, despite the fact that the rest of the food world seems to have moved on — now there's a whole new slew of hot food items that were once unassuming pantry staples.
An it-food must be a little controversial: Not everyone enjoys the lumpiness of cottage cheese, the smell of tinned fish, or the brininess of an olive.
A recent viral tweet listed nearly two dozen of these items as 'pick me' foods, including tinned fish, dates, rice cakes, olives, dark chocolate, and bone broth. (Though typically used in dating contexts, to be a 'pick me' is to do something solely for the attention because you believe it makes you special or different — e.g., begging someone to pick you.)
Jaya Saxena, a correspondent at Eater, describes these foods as giving an aura of 'I've studied abroad,' that they lend a sophistication other, more popular foods don't. An it-food must be a little controversial: Not everyone enjoys the lumpiness of cottage cheese, the smell of tinned fish, or the brininess of an olive. You should feel a little special for being able to recognize its merit. If you're a social media creator making it-food content, so should your commenters who agree that pickles are hugely underrated and then form a little tribe around them. (Its reverse is also crucial to drive engagement: 'There is some level of rage bait happening here, where you can get people to be like, 'Ew, I hate olives!'' Saxena says. 'And then someone says, 'I'm Greek, you're racist for saying that.'')
The food and consumer packaged goods industries, seeing this chatter play out online, will then jump to invest in cool, elevated (and needless to say more expensive) iterations to appeal to this hot new market. It-foods should also have humble origins — oysters used to be cheap! — and therefore be ripe for a rebranding. Meme pages will make collages of these hot new products in a tone that is both laudatory and ironic, gently poking fun at the desperation of the brands and the coolhunters who buy them; journalists and trend watchers will compile them all into stories about what it all means, if anything. And thus, an it-gredient is born.
This cycle is a relatively new one. Food trends in the 20th century typically traveled top-down from cookbook publishers, professional chefs, the food industry, and pop culture, then spread to the masses. It was Julia Child and The Joy of Cooking, for instance, that made quiche inescapable at 1970s dinner parties, while a single scene of a 2000 episode of Sex and the City officially launched the cupcake craze.
Then in the early 2010s, Instagram changed everything. Food now had to look good in a flat lay photo (colorful macarons and avocado toast were early favorites), or shock viewers with too-weird-to-be-believed social media bait like rainbow bagels and milkshakes with whole-ass pieces of cake on top. Simultaneously, a backlash brewed on Tumblr, where all the cool kids were suddenly making cheesy, fatty junk foods like pizza, cheeseburgers, and tacos a part of their digital identity as a winky response to picture-perfect treats on social media. The Hairpin coined it 'snackwave,' one part self-deprecation and one part ironic nihilism ('touch my butt and buy me pizza'). Snackwave was Jennifer Lawrence in gowns on a red carpet talking about pizza, it was Miley Cyrus straddling a hot dog, and it was the accounts for Taco Bell and Denny's mimicking the affectations of Weird Twitter.
Notably, the biggest food trends of the current moment are not themselves meals or dishes but rather ingredients. Saxena points out that olives and tinned fish tend to feel a bit more chic than a bowl of pasta (they also tend to look cuter on, say, a pair of pants). 'All these foods are items you would find on a grazing table or a cocktail garnish,' she says. 'Eating styles like charcuterie boards and 'girl dinner' are about assembling things rather than cooking — here are my little cubes of cheese, my olives, my martini. It's this sort of aperitif culture that's more about assembling beautiful little things.'
But a more pivotal reason that this era's it-foods are largely ingredients you can pick up in a grocery store might be because post-Covid, even basics have seen their prices skyrocket. These days, coming home with a colorful grocery cart is no longer a given — it's a status symbol.
'Older generations saw groceries as more of utility, and maybe it's late stage capitalism, but it's weird that somehow the only thing we have left to social signal is with our groceries,' Hernández says. 'I always think, we're living in Andy Warhol's biggest dream, how he made Campbell's cans a message of mass consumption. I'm like, 'Wow, we're insane.''
Because there are influencers for everything now, there are also grocery influencers showing off their supermarket hauls; one such creator who shops at the high-end Los Angeles grocery store Erewhon mused to Cosmopolitan, 'People will go to these stores as tourists just to see them, like a museum.' Perhaps grocery store staples are status items because everything is a status item now, from water bottles to dog breeds. Or perhaps it's because we're all just desperate to belong to something, even if the bonds of community are as loose as 'everyone here loves pickles.'
This is why I often feel as though something in me died when I started buying Graza, the yassified olive oil that comes in a tall skinny squeeze top bottle with beautiful packaging and costs roughly 25 percent more than the kind I bought previously. It feels corny to fall for such a naked attempt at rebranding an item that was perfectly good to begin with, founded by people who came from similarly 'disruptive' brands like Magic Spoon and Casper. Alison Roman once described such marketing pivots as having ''Hello, Fellow Young People' energy,' Grub Street referred to it as 'smallwashing.'
'We're living in Andy Warhol's biggest dream, how he made Campbell's cans a message of mass consumption.'
On Snaxshot and other in-the-know Instagram accounts where people poke fun at their own tastes, Graza and its ilk are stand-ins for a certain type of wannabe urban sophisticate, someone who has failed to achieve anything intellectually or creatively fulfilling and therefore relies on status olive oil to feel culturally relevant. (Though of course I tell myself I buy it because the sqeezey top is legitimately innovative, product design-wise.)
These products have already begun to feel cringe because they recall an even more humiliating food trend associated with millennials than avocados: bacon. Remember in the late 2000s, when Reddit humor — advice animal memes, dogespeak, ironic finger mustache tattoos — decided that inserting bacon into things that didn't already include bacon in them instantly made them 'epic'? I think about 'epic bacon' every time a new food trend shows up on my feed, wondering if pickles or espresso martinis or olives will get big and omnipresent and annoying enough to line the halls of Gen Z's most embarrassing tastes in the eyes of future generations.
The latest shelf-stable item to get the it-gredient treatment is perhaps the least sexy of them all. This year's excitement over beans can pretty much be traced back to a single person: Violet Witchel, a popular cooking TikToker who in 2024 posted a video of the 'dense bean salad' she made for healthy meal preps. Though she'd posted recipes and other videos of the salad before, she'd previously referred to it as a 'chickpea salad' or 'white bean salad.'
But when she added a single adjective, her videos exploded, garnering her tens of millions of views and 700,000 new followers. Suddenly, Witchel became 'dense bean salad girl.' She launched a Substack, where she now has more than 162,000 subscribers and earns a 'high six figures' income, stemming largely from her innovation — or rather, rebranding — of describing a bean salad as 'dense.'
While 'bean salad' sounds like something your aunt would bring to a barbecue, 'dense bean salad' implies that it is packed with nutrients, that this one dish acts as a full meal, and, of course, that you can prepare it in advance. 'People are turning to beans as an affordable protein source,' she says. 'And they love a quick and snappy' name.
As for what's next, she senses fiber is about to make a serious comeback (a prediction echoed on this very website): 'My theory is that all the colon cancer research coming out is going to make soluble fiber the next big thing. I wouldn't be surprised if figs or broccoli had a moment, or lentils or popcorn. I could see 'making my nightly popcorn!' becoming a fiber snack trend.'
Food influencers, meme accounts, and the consumer packaged goods industry: You have your marching orders.
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