December 20, 2016
Imagine your least favorite food.
Now, imagine that for some god-forsaken reason, many eateries put your least favorite food on your plate – or in your meal – without first asking your permission.
You would feel violated, wouldn’t you?
You might even throw that food out the window of your car if said meal was procured at a drive-thru window.
Welcome to my world, one where the pickle is an abomination to taste buds and decency. Yet there they are, everywhere I look, sometimes sullying the meals that I spend my hard-earned money on.
It is long past time for this unsolicited, undeserved aggression to end.
Some of you like pickles. I get that. But you are not decent people, at least not if you think it’s OK for a restaurant to force pickles upon those of us whose stomachs turn at the mere sight or – worstly – smell of those squishy, acidic intruders.
I know what you’re thinking: STFU, Hickey. There are starving kids across the globe who would gladly eat those pickles that you detest; it might even be the lone sustenance that keeps them alive.
To which I retort: Good. Like those pre-printed championship t-shirts that get shipped overseas when said teams lose said championship games, send them as far away from me as possible.
I don’t care if pickle juice allegedly helped the Eagles crush the Cowboys in 2000. Science hasn’t come close to backing those claims, anyway.
One co-worker I just asked about pickles equated them to “eating an amphibian.”
I don’t care if people have been eating them since two dozen centuries before the birth of Christ. There have been a lot of wrong people to grace the face of earth over the years.
I don’t care if Cleopatra claimed that eating pickles made her beautiful. I never met her.
I don’t care if America is named after pickle-pimp Amerigo Vespucci. It's probably why we don't have big Vespucci Day celebrations, tbqh.
I don’t care if America’s per-person pickle consumption rate is nine pounds a year. We ingest a lot of dust mites, too.
I don’t care if pickles are rich in the vitamin that helps stave off blood clots, or that they’re at the heart of a $2.3 billion industry. You can buy vitamin K elsewhere, and the gun industry turns a pretty penny, too.
What I care about is how pickle privilege somehow convinced food merchants that it’s OK to destroy meals with a product that many, many people detest.
What I care about is Big Pickle perverting science in an effort to hold your pickle-craving addictive tendencies hostage, to the point of claiming you love pickles, only to fatten their billfolds.
What I care about is defying a tradition that sees the birth of Christ reduced to an excuse to hide a pickle in a Christmas tree.
What I care about is the fact one of the nine co-workers I just asked about pickles equated them to “eating an amphibian” and another couldn’t even put her disdain into words. She physically recoiled at the thought of them, though, amid a room of dill-pickle enthusiasts.
This is what pickles do to people, and it's just not right to subject them to that because you want that green foodstuff on your plate.
The onus should NOT be on we noble warriors to explicitly request our plates be pickle-free.
It should be on the loathsome pickle fans of the world to request that their’s contain the disgusting entity. After all, it was presumptuous New Yorkers who started this nonsense with their “derp derp derp pickles help cleanse the palate derp derp derp” insanity.
Deli owners who say pickles are a necessary component of a good sandwich? Gherkin jerks. Their products epitomize “core disgust.”
If people would just let cucumbers be cucumbers – delicious when sliced and put in a glass of water – the world would be a much happier, classier place.
But that’s not about to happen, is it? The world is too far gone for compassionate logic to intervene now.
So how about we just start by not putting pickles on people’s plates unless they explicitly request one. That's not too much to ask.
