It's A Goddamn Pickle

Pickles are delicious, and while I'm not loyal to any one particular brand, Mount Olive is among my favorites. Still, I get the same thought in my head nearly every time I pop open the jar to retrieve a salty spear. A three-word phrase stamped on the lid, mocking me with its questionable authenticity, is the seed of that thought:

Refrigerate after opening

It is certainly not unique to Mount Olive, as I have seen it printed somewhere on the jar of every pickle brand on supermarket shelves. Claussen pickles are sold from a refrigerated case, so it makes some sense for them to be stored in the icebox. But still...it's a damn pickle. The whole idea behind the cucumber pickle was that the preservation came from the vinegar and salt in the brine, and it didn't require additional help. Sailors in the sixteenth century would take pickles on long oversea voyages, and they sure as fuck didn't have refrigerators. What the hell did we do to the pickle to make it unsafe for dry shelf storage after opening the jar?

I've heard some people claim the pickle is crunchier after sitting in the chill chest. I don't buy that argument, since Koreans have been burying jars of kimchi for hundreds of years, and their pickled vegetables come out of the ground crunchy, even after months sitting around in the fucking dirt, without a fridge in sight. Still, it doesn't explain the wording: Refrigerate after opening. It's not a suggestion, it's a demand. As in, "You'll die of food poisoning if you don't stick this in the cold after exposing the pickles to the air."

Shit, maybe I should stop eating these things.