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American Sour Candy Pickle Body Horror
By Joelle Van Glidden
August, 2025
I learned so much about myself confronting this menace, and now you should as well.
It was another dark, overcast, hot humid day in the gruesome seaside fishing village of Portland, ME, a town known primarily for inspiring a bigger, more pretentious version of itself as a mirror half on America's western coast (self parody being both the MO for the hipster generation and Maine's soul of self-conscious rustication). Many states are more rural than Maine, more "authentic" in whatever ways, but few are as self-conscious of their designed status as glorified resorts for vacationers, the wealthy, sportsmen, and structural inequality, with the possible exception of Florida (the ground from where I've always privately believed the Warhead's mascot originally hatched in the 90’s). We here in Maine like to rebuild new things to look old; we mix blueberries with everything from garam masala to bitcoin to tease drunk tourists out of their money; we force even some of our McDonalds' locations to look like historical colonial mansions, pretending as though it’s possible to class up a place people go to keep from getting too hungover. Maine is, indeed, a place meant to get hungover, but to look classy while doing it.
In the inverse of that spirit I’ve decided instead to feel direct pain and look trashy while doing it, by trying out a gift I had been given by some friends who know that I enjoy sour foods, novelty items, and the hermaneutic power of fixating on the most confounding examples of the marketplace's divine and infinite capacity to give us exactly what we're not asking for, in an abundance that dwarfs the attention paid to our most vital needs. I don’t know what market was clamoring for this particular novelty but I'm not enough of an econometrician to investigate the matter, though if any mechanistic chain of necessity could possibly predict the economy, I'd like to see the formula that forecasts the market for this. A friend informed me that homemade kool aid pickes are popular in the South, but for all I know those actually might taste good, and this little piece is about whatever I now hold in my hand. Since I’m the only one who holds it, such an econometric formula might be(come) the one that defines my existence.
When I received this "gift" (is "gift" so conceptually different from "judgment"?) at a party of old friends recently, not only did every single guest who knew me reaffirm that I'm the intended marketplace for this, my protest that Wally the Warhead would put his face on any mishapen pile of perfume and gelatin in a foil bag that wants to trot through a dollar store candy aisle, was met only by the observation—by someone on the other side of the room—that only I, of all people, would know the Warheads' spokes-phantasm on a first-name basis. I put the pickle in my purse and refilled whatever I was drinking.
With any luck I'm the only person who has actually taken this #challenge and the only one who ever speaks of it in public.
Withdrawing freshly scented with the social tang of being a "pickle-lady", "sourpuss", "citruswhore", "sour patch bitch", etc., I went home with the koolaid cucumber proudly protruding from my purse, and still wrapped in the pink gift bag in which it was given to me, and placed it in my closet like a naughty surprise--you know. The kind that you don't want to see? Naughty in the truest, least-sexy sense of the word? A dark secret in an elf’s bodybag?
A realistic-skin dildo for necrophiliac smurfs.
One even darker and hotter day a week later, as I'm laying in bed after work, still pitifully scared of the azure ghoul in my closet, I decide that it's time to face my fears. I was broke and living in a new place, so I was eating a lot of random, unconnected foods, and that is my explanation for why I thought the following would be a good idea: since this is clearly the only country on earth that would produce a pickle like this, it must be used as a component in the most American sandwich possible. No, not a tiny cheeseburger, but a burnt baloney and cheese on toast—the sort of thing Real Americans Really Eat while they're waiting for their Really Huge Medical and School Debt to get paid off. Hip-ish young-ish people here in the U.S. like to dare each other to eat foods that will put us into the "debt-hospital" (note to foreigners: in America the words "debt", "school" and "hospital" are synonyms).
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Now let's talk about the pickle itself. Yes the blue one. The one looking like a sea cucumber that got dyed in a bank heist. Slice it open and you will see that no expense was spared in the food dye department, which (one can only assume) in candy factories across this nation has become almost royally immune to the threat of shrinkflation ("If the great food dyes of this nation die, why, the colors of the old Union Jack or whatever might as well fade too!" the cigar-chomping manifestation of America declares with a fistpound on his food-dye-stained desk). I won't lie, confined to the mere visual level, it looks like a breathtaking indigo jewel, something that would lay uncut and gilded in a palace—something worth the heist. I would be clinging to the enticing beauty of this mental image the entire time I tried my first slice. It was better in any case, I surmised, to think of it more like a crown jewel and less like a cocksheath shared by the Blue Man Group.
I never understood Van Holten's single-serving pickle packages. Americans are familiar with this brand name as the primary victor of the gas station pickle market, the "McDonalds" or "Hershey's" of convenience pickles. It's a shame that so many Americans’ conception of what a sour pickle is is conjoined by association to these revolting veggie corpses stood up in bags on the gas station shelves, as though both refridgeration and finding a location for them out of the sunlight are luxuries too precious for their ilk. The truly sour (and deliciously so) pickles that I know and love are to be found in delis all across the northeast (if not the whole country, I don’t get out much) and—by contrast—the cheap grabbable room-temp Van Holten picklebags are not nearly as sour nor as salty as an “authentic” sour deli pickle. Pickles are probably the one food that northern and northeastern Americans really make well: we have incredible pickle-based dishes like the Chicago hot dog and the Maine Italian (there are probably others too). And yet Van Holten supplies every gas station with an unsalty, unsour pickle aided by chemical-flavored "preservatives" to keep it shelf-stable in the hot window-mangnified gas station sun. Are salt and vinegar too expensive as preservatives for you Van Houten or whatever? As a former laundry attendant who used to work with funeral homes, your pickle tastes and smells like embalming fluid. I yearned for my favorite sour pickle, that of Amato's, the essential ingredient in a Maine Italian, a polemical but uniquely delicious regional submarine sandwich-hotdog (everything here is on a hotdog roll for some reason) that resembles a Chicago hot dog with salami or ham and eats like a pugnatious big-cut lettuceless salad barely held together with an aggressively oversized hot dog bun and covered mercilessly in unwieldly veggies and pickles. The Amato's pickle is so sour, so simple, and so delicious, that its brine ties all the flavors together and makes the whole sandwich make sense. Vinegar is a powerful but deadly force in cooking and it ought to be used with care. Vinegar might be the most wholesome part of human history.
But besides Van Houtens the one pickle I hate the most is so disgusting that I don't want to learn its name (for the purposes of this piece, of course, I actually had to—they're called "sweet gherkins", named after the traditional term for 3rd base in northern Appalachia). It's a super-sugary sweet pickle served as an appetizer at New England thanksgivings that contains some of the most medieval and disgusting flavor combinations known to picklesphere. It tastes like a pack of clove cigarettes and a package of cheap British licorice got into a fistfight and fell into a vat of Coca-Cola syrup. Sweet foods are yummy; spicy and herbal foods are good; but this tastes like it was meant to flavor the cigar of a mythical racist giant. Being primarily a sour (rather than sweet) pickle fan, I am usually able to avoid these tiny shriveled gremlin dicks on any day that isn’t Thanksgiving, the one day of begrudging dependence that we allow ourselves in the one country that most fetishizes independence.
So I was immediately surprised that this "sour" (candy) pickle of the Warheads and Van Holtens partnership contains the distinct flavors of clove and cinnamon, as though it were a sweet gherkin that was made wthout sugar, and with a little bit more vinegar added (plus of course embalming fluid in lieu of sodium or any spices outside of those mentioned in nursery rhymes). Brilliant move, Van Houten. A pickle that fuses the flavors of gherkins and deli pickles together is itself already an AI-generated computer error of a food before you added the blue dye and beaver anus extract. Which brings me to the "blue raspberry" flavor elements. Whatever you are imagininging is not as bad as it actually was for me. Right now you're imagining a pickle, which is simultaneously a sweet gherkin and a sour pickle, that has been steeped in the flavor of a Dum-Dum-brand lollipop, or a blue Jolly Rancher, or blue raspberry Mike and Ikes, or whatever.
Enjoying the pickle.
The most specific description of the blue raspberry element of the flavor that I can give is that it is distinctly and exactly the same as the Slush Puppy brand of convenience store frozen drinks. Anyone who grew up in the 90's remembers the Slush Puppy, and if by chance those machines still exist today, each adult including myself undoubtably walks right by them every time we enter the convenience store, fully oblivious and unbothered by the following eyes of that adorably creepy snow-white hound. At one point in my childhood the northern Augusta Big Apple Slush Puppy machine had "Sour Blast" squirt-bottles of sour liquid that one could squirt into one’s candy-flavored artificial snow for added zest, a squirt bottle that I abused on too many occasion ("Get away from my ghostly sugar puppy!" the convenience store clerk howled, banning me from the store, and I still feel weird about going into that store today).
As my frowning mouth’s upset inner teeth chewed at the gelatinous sapphire medallion, each chew injecting more bitterness into my soft organs, each accompanying moment of distress continuously lengthening my perception of time itself, my brain tore each flavor painfully from chests of childhood memories. The Slush Puppy, the relative who brought gerkhins to Thanksgiving, the halfhearted embalming vinegar—all of these flavors mixed in my mouth to remind me eternally of Trash, of Banishment, of Reponsibility, of Tradition, Custom, Gehenna, Death, Preservation, and Laundromats. My lower body wanted to gag, but my upper body, feeling the pressure of social responsibility, clamps down upon the involuntary response, in fear of allowing the flavor to contaminate the rest of the world. "What if an ant walks buy, tastes the pickle, and mutates into a creature that will spread violently across the universe?" my feverish mind worries. What if mankind follows suit? I decide to physically embrace the foreign matter with a fearful throat, pretending to believe my imagination's least-despairing interpretation of this flavor, which is that I accidentally ate a gherkin and some freshly-upholstered commercial lemon juice by accident, and that as customary of the usual decorum, swallowing is always more polite than spitting.
With that in mind, I knew I had to finish off this dark night of experimentation by trying to see if there are any culinary uses for this food-and-non-food-flavored food, for an American never saw a simulacrum she didn't want to "ironically" (at this point, the word means perfunctorily) appropriate. "Maybe I could invent a sandwich stupid enough to make this pickle taste good," I thought to myself in hopeful tones and delusional timbres of self-rationalizing mental saxaphone-blues. Enter our ingredients: baloney, cheese, lettuce, pepper, and mayonnaise. Simplicity aims for victory.
Like four decorative soaps on a trailer park panini.
As the pictures show, I fried two baloney slices and let them chill out in the pan with a Velveeta slice between them, changing physical states together in a pleasant menage: the kind of sandwich base that would charm the pants off of any ketchup-blooded hungry American.
Speaking of sin, my next job was to make a sauce for the sandwich, and I decided to simply mix mayonnaise and pickle juice. I was inspired by the old kewpie burger sauce made from mayo, sugar and olive brine, which is a surprisingly delicious concoction on well-cooked red meat. What I am doing here would later become proof that not everything can be deliciously mixed with mayo. This ended up tasting like the housepaint it looks like, something that less recalls the flavor of what it’s mostly made of than what has perfumed it by unforseen circumstance. I added a bit of sugar in the hope of offsetting the cartoonish slush puppy flavor. I was hoping for something savory and fruity and tangy but ended up with a Djarum ash clam dip.
It really sucks that I did this. Just realizing as I see the pictures.
At this moment I recall the advice given to me by a friend I texted with after the party where I received the pickle. I was babbling on about how using the blue rasp pickle in a ham sandwich would probably "shatter my mind and astrally-project my body into metaphysico-culinary ecstasy.” A few days later I recalled that I’m flat broke, so I told him it'll have to be baloney sandwich instead. His response: "I don’t think Bologna is up to that task." I beg to differ: if the world's most reviled form of mortadella isn't majestic enough to hang with this Cronenbergian freak of a pickle, then what forcemeat could? For that matter, is baloney any more processed, any less spiced, than ham is? Or any meat? What's more important here, taste, association, or authenticity?
Either way I need to add some crispy fried “onions”. These are def the real deal. [Editor’s note: crispy fried onions are not real in any way except physically]
That frankly begs the question this whole piece asks to beg. I'm about to eat a sandwhich whose pickles are made with an artificial version (I’m referring to the part that tastes like embalming fluid) of already artificial preservatives (vinegar, salt). It's flavored with the concept of a fruit that does not exist, the mythical (yet, in the gustatory sense, very real and recognizable) “blue raspberry”. Its sauce is made out of sauces. This isn't just, arguably, the most American sandwich yet invented, but it exists as a philosophical challenge: what is authenticity? Do categories matter when categories can't be distinguished in such a reality-challenging food paradox? Do I call the sauce The Blues, because I hear grieving saxaphone music in my head when I taste it, or call it what it actually tastes like? I wanted it to taste like creamy blueberry jam but instead it tastes like sunscreen from the Kool Aid Man's fupa.
Taking a picture of this in good lighting would’ve been tantamount to endorsement of what’s happening.
There would be no way to make a "natural" or "authentic" version of this: there are no blue raspberries in nature; embalmbing fluid can't be easily found in the forest, etc. It takes millions of workers to construct a single slice of bologna. No one knows what Velveeta is.
"Philosophizing ends," wrote David Hume or Johan Huizinga or someone, "when playtime begins," which is a quote I just made up because I'm too lazy to re-read the ending of Book I of Hume's Treatise, altho I can easily envision 'le bon David' playing badminton while saying it, drunk as a monk, wine in one hand, and a French courtesan (who looks exactly like me) in the other. With this in mind I took a bite from the sandwich.
Fun fact: it’s a customary prank for older pupils to serve these to unwitting freshbuffoons at clown college, referring to them as “Clown Melts” and falsely claiming that consuming them daily is part of their clown-breaking.
Suddenly—and not exactly to my shock but to a very distinct degree of it—my philosophizing came rushing back into my head painfully and recklessly. The thanksgiving appetizers have spilled onto the floor, and I am Aunt Nancy's excited terrier frantically licking gherkin-juice out of a box of blue raspberry Mike and Ikes. The flavor is excruciating. Flapping itself out of the floodwaters of blue-flavored brine in my mouth, the baloney screams "Why?" from the roof of my palate like a Greek tragic hero. The Velveeta, normally the most confident part of the sandwich, is confused as to which ingredient it is supposed to be complementing, and ends up tasting like a blueberry cheesecake and an uncooked brick of spam fell in love and gave birth to an entree known as "Satan's pâté". I decided that this sandwich could only be consumed in the spirit of obsessive self-analysis, gallows humor and irreverence toward all cherished convention, so I got robot-stoned while eating it and watched the latest Taylor Tomlinson special. God I miss After Midnight. Chris Fleming would've ridden this diabolical blue dingdong through the sky like a cowgirl on a nuclear warhead.
The worst part of that great show ending is they won’t be able to make a killer improv game out of this intentionally disgusting commercially-produced pickle. Or point out that I was born without fingernails as the perfect low hanging fruit for processed food jokes.
The moral of this story is that American culture makes sense only when commodity fetishism is applied to a Northern European sense of taste: fruit, vinegar, and forcemeat can make some good sandwiches, but not when an atomic citric acid ghost from the 90's and a mediocre gas station pickle company shove their, well, pickles and warheads in the way. Next time, I'm going the authentic route and making a sandwich from real Amato's pickles, blue raspberry Mike and Ikes, blue raspberry Slush Puppy syrup, mortadella (maybe even ham), and authentic American cheese (which is—fun fact—made from losing lottery tickets). And someday I will acheive the ultimate blue pickle sandwich. Being an American means getting constantly saddled with labels like waiters in a Sartre essay, and watching future iterations of that label becoming more and more like-themselves over time, the very process of the sedimentation of idiosyncrasy. The theme park that is modern Portland, ME, is but a symbol of the Disneyfication of all of northern New England since industrialism disappeared. The prophesy that Stephen King foretold of is now set in stone, as the blue raspberry flavors work their way into the nerves of my spine: Future pickle-ladies will acheive future horrors the day this corpse-and-fiction-flavored preserved gourd can be purchased in any store, and the foretold ascention of the demon-king Wally Van Houten-Warhead summons to battle the future End Times' un-American forces of Good.