From pickle juice to riches in one easy lesson

Maybe you weren't even thinking about dill pickles this morning.

But after my experience in the checkout line of the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market on Independence Street, dill pickles are all I can think about.

Where to start?

Let's start here: Most people I know, including myself, like dill pickles. Oh, sure, there are few exceptions. There always are. But dill pickles and I have a long, mostly good history.

For example, when I was growing up on the Killough Valley farm in the Ozarks over yonder, I needed a snack after walking two and a half miles home from school. My favorite snack was simple: two slices of white Wonder bread smeared with peanut butter topped with sliced dill pickles. That's right, a dill pickle-and-peanut butter sandwich. My wife cringes every time she sees me make one.

(By the way, a good substitute for dill pickles on a peanut butter sandwich is sweet relish. But this is about dill pickles, so you'll have to figure the sweet relish out on your own.)

Dill pickles, as you know, take many forms. There's your whole dill pickle, your hamburger slices, your long-sliced pickle and so on. Me? I favor the whole dill pickle, which can be satisfactorily chomped whilst eating a sandwich. But if you're putting the pickle on a sandwich, it needs to be sliced, one way or the other. You choose.

Now, thanks to my safari into the brightly lit aisles of my Wal-mart Neighborhood Market, I know there is another form of dill pickle.

There I was, waiting in line at the checkout (it's a law at every Wal-Mart store that there must be at least two fewer checkers than needed at all times) where I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes: reading the headlines splashed across the national tabloids so handily displayed next to waiting-in-line customers.

You know the tabloids I'm talking about. They're the ones you wouldn't be caught dead paying for, but you occasionally sample while you wait for the customer in front of you to find her credit card AFTER all her purchases have been bagged. This is when you discover that a good many shoppers not only do not keep their credit cards in a readily accessible spot, but also toss them into a valise-sized handbag full of everything from gum to guns to snotty facial tissues.

Good grief. I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to.

Anyway, there was this tabloid that shrieked: "Princess Diana alive! Living in a double-wide near Cabool!"

I couldn't believe it. I was pretty sure she died in a tragic accident in Paris. But here was this headline ... .

And, here was something else. It came into my peripheral vision first, and then I turned to identify what I was seeing.

Here was a display stand chock full, from the floor to the top of my head, of something green but not immediately identifiable.

The packaging yelled "Pickle Pops!"

I vaguely remembered plastic tubes with Kool-Aid or some sweet liquid inside that you put in the freezer for homemade Popsicles.

But pickle juice? That, indeed, was what I was looking at: plastic tubes filled with dill pickle juice ready to be solidified in your very own freezer.

I have to tell you, folks. As much as I like dill pickles, this seemed to go a bit too far.

When I got home, I started thinking about my Wal-Mart experience. In no time at all I realized I had to hand it to some genius for coming up with the Pickle Pop idea. Basically you take a waste product (how many gallons of pickle juice have you poured down the kitchen drain?) and turned it into cold cash. Attaboy!

Think about it. What's in your refrigerator or cupboard right now that you will, sooner or later, throw in the trash or down the drain? And how could you make money with this stuff?

I see the peanut butter jar that was first opened sometime after Obama was elected. What about "Plastic-Barrel Aged Peanut Butter"?

And what about that jar of Greek olives we bought at least two refrigerators ago? Might they sell as "Thousand-Year-Old Artisanal Olives"?

You get my drift.

Now if I could think of something snazzy to do with dryer lint. I'll bet I could get a special display at Wal-Mart with that.

Think big, folks. The future is yours.

Think Pickle Pops!

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.