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In truth, I despise eating pickles because they remind me of the deaths of many friends. But I do not want to be rude. —Sell Out by Simon Rich

The movie “An American Pickle” tells the story of a turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant to New York who falls into a vat at the pickle factory where he works, only to wake up 100 years later in hipster New York, where, to his constant astonishment, the men all have beards like his, no one speaks Yiddish, but everyone loves his homemade pickles.

“Artisanal,” they call them.

The movie is based on a series of four New Yorker short stories by Simon Rich called “Sell Out.” One theme coursing through the stories is that everything old is new again. Nothing really dies. Beards, old Jewish men’s names, selling out — it’s all just recycled, often in increasingly disappointing and comic ways.

And if Rich was searching for a metaphor for death and regeneration, he couldn’t have done better than the pickle.

Real kosher dills are created through a process called lacto-fermentation. Nothing but cucumbers, water, salt, dill, and spices go into the barrel. Microorganisms in the air and on the skin of the cucumbers penetrate the cell membranes and transform the sugars inside. Just as fermented grapes become wine and cabbage become sauerkraut, cucumbers become half- or full-sours. The process of decay creates new life.

“As one of the primary processes by which nature breaks down living things so that their energies and atoms might be reused by other living things, fermentation puts us in touch with the ever-present tug, in life, of death,” Michael Pollan writes in “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.”

The probiotics that do the heavy lifting, we all now know, are fundamental not just to flavor but to health. Eat more real pickles (and yogurt, and wine, and sourdough), and you too could very well wake up in 100 years.

“There are three important keys to pickling: patience, hard work, and rage,” Herschel says in Rich’s story. “Rage, of these three, is by far the most vital. Pickling can be torture, like living inside an endless nightmare. The only way to have success is to approach each day with violence.”

This, I have found after years of pickling, is untrue. Pickling is easy. Just keep your jars, hands, and utensils clean, follow the instructions, and in a few days, you’ll have pickles. I’ve taught pickling to classrooms of college students at USC and to families in a low-income neighborhood near USC, and at the end, the look on their faces always reads the same: Wait, that’s all? You mean, I just made pickles?

Beyond being simple, pickling is the opposite of a nightmare. It calms me. No, it amazes me. It puts me in touch with some of the most profound truths of life: every death is a rebirth, and change can be wonderful (and anyway, it’s inevitable).

I once had the honor of interviewing the guru of fermentation, Sandor Katz, author of “The Art of Fermentation,” on stage at Temple Emanu-el in Manhattan in 2016. He put it perfectly: “The transience of life must be together with the transience of death. Isn’t that the lesson of these bacteria?”

Herschel, of course, doesn’t see it that way. For him, it’s just a miserable way to make a living.

“Whole Foods sells a pickle jar for seven,” he says. “I sell for four and include all the scum… ‘Pickles here!’ I scream. ‘Pickles with garlic and scum!’”

Fortunately for Herschel, his pickles take off, rebranded as Sarah’s Statue of Liberty Garlic Pickles, scum and all (literal spoiler alert). The hipsters even transform them into hipster dishes.

As he recounts: “That night, Simon’s goy comes with a giant bag of vegetables. ‘I heard you’re into pickling,’ she says. ‘So I went on Epicurious and planned a pickle-themed menu. We’re having broiled trout with pickle butter—and a pickle-vinaigrette salad on the side.’”

Rich doesn’t give the recipes for these dishes, which of course, he offers up mockingly. But, hey, they sound good to me. So in honor of “An American Pickle,” I’ve devised the recipes myself, including my own for garlicky pickles.

Because if Herschel’s story teaches us anything, generations come and go, but pickles are forever.