If you want to drink pickle juice like Jonathan Turner, there are rules.
Buy Vlasic, never kosher.
Have one glass at dinner; three Dixie cups throughout the day.
As a general rule, avoid more than 12 ounces per sitting. Too much vinegar loosens up your stool. And you wouldn't want that, would you?
Just ask Turner, a criminal defense attorney in town. He answers legal questions with such speedy efficiency that his partners call him "Toogle," a reference to the search engine Google.
But when it comes to the juice? His wife, his colleagues, no one quite gets it.
"Are you really writing about the pickle juice?" asked Bill Speek, one of his legal partners.
The answer, Mr. Speek, is yes.
A small mountain of boxes lines the front wall of Turner's office at Seventh and Cherry streets in downtown Chattanooga. They're filled with - what else? Gallon bottles of pickle juice that he orders from a company in Texas.
"I don't think you could find someone who's 36 who's consumed more pickle juice than me," Turner said on a recent Friday. "It's not casual for me. It's a true daily need."
Aristotle extolled the health benefits of cured cucumbers. Queen Cleopatra championed pickles as the secret ingredient of her beauty. Even Shakespeare worked the metaphor "caught in a pickle" into his plays.
It all began for a young Turner when he reached into the fridge and found a jar of pickles. His father loved them, his sister loved them. The green spears were always around the house.
"So one day I just said, 'I'm going to drink the juice in that jar.' My family never drank the juice, so it kind of worked out because I was always there."
Like all habits, this one deepened.
Turner's sister was a big skater as a child, so the family often went to the roller rink on Saturday. Young Turner didn't care for skating. But he did love the 25-cent cups of pickle juice they sold at the concession stand.
At law school in Michigan in the early 2000s, Turner's classmates guffawed at the habit. So did airport security when Turner tried to lug a 5-gallon bucket of pickles onto a plane in 2003.
Sir, I don't know if you can check this jar of pickles.
Like any good lawyer, though, Turner showed them the rule: If it was a sealed factory item of produce, airport security couldn't open it or inspect it.
"That was before Amazon Prime, and getting stuff shipped," Turner said, motioning to the boxes of pickle juice in his office. "I was 22 then."
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A few more tips:
Be wary of pickle spears. "They're delicious, man, but they're packed in so tight, there's not a lot of juice."
Beware "the $3 cocktail."
Sometimes, if your stash is low or your craving is severe, you'll stop at the grocery store, buy a $3 jar of Vlasic pickles, dump the spears in the parking lot, and chug that green tangy liquid all the way home.
"Drinking one of those a day ends up getting pricey," Turner said.
Finally, find a life partner who can handle your addiction. Turner's wife doesn't mind the pickle juice, he said.
"Here's where I embarrass my wife," he said. "When I go to the movie theater, there'll be a container with only two pickles and lots of juice. My thought is, it's all going to go to waste. So I say, 'Hey man, can I have a glass of that juice?'
Oh, one other thing: Withdrawals are real.
"I really think I'm addicted to it," Turner said. "I say that jokingly, but I really think I have a physical need for it."
"My wife and I got married in Rome, Italy," he said, "and pickles don't really exist over there like they do over here. So we went to every grocery store and I couldn't find pickles anywhere.
"The way I ended up satisfying my pickle need was McDonald's and Subway," he continued. "The McDonald'ses were 100 percent American knockoffs. Nothing Italian about them. And I would say, 'Hey, can you get me some pickles and juice?'
***
Turner said he's known some people who occasionally have a sip of pickle juice. "But I drink whole glasses at a time," he said. "And I don't know anyone else who does that."
The Times Free Press found a few other diehard pickle juice drinkers.
"My mom has always tried to get me to stop, but I never have," said Katelyn Moon, 21. "Every time she would open a new jar, I would drink all of the juice out of it. She would get so mad when she got the pickle jar out of the fridge and it was juiceless."
"Tell the attorney he isn't alone," said Rachel Lang, 26. "Most of my family does this. I've gone so far as to pour the juice into a cup and drink from a straw on more than one occasion."
Most of the drinkers, including Turner, said they never encountered health problems with pickle juice. It has no calories, no fat, no alcohol. It is, however, loaded with vinegar.
"It gave me kidney stones because of all the sodium in it," said Jessica Lyle, 23, of Cleveland, Tenn. "That was about four years ago, and I never had them before. They don't really run in the family."
Lyle attributed the kidney stones to pickle juice, which she used to consume in jar-a-day quantities. After she had the kidney stones blasted out, she and the doctor were joking around about her habit.
"I guess that's the last time you're going to drink it, huh?"
"Oh my gosh, yes, I'm never going to drink it again," Lyle recalled saying.
Three days passed. Then the craving - for pickle juice - returned.
"Here I am, drinking it again," Lyle said, laughing over the phone. "I'll just go into kidney failure, no big deal."
Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at zpeterson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6347. Follow on Twitter @zackpeterson918.