Spam canned meat sales

It turns out that between 2010 and 2022, Americans bought more canned Spam in almost perfect proportion to the number of people killed by drunk drivers, which suggests either that Spam is somehow driving people to drink and then to drive, or that we have finally discovered the one thing more predictable than human behaviour itself: the rate at which human behaviour becomes predictable. The universe has apparently decided that if you're going to track two completely unrelated phenomena, it might as well make them move in lockstep, just to see if anyone notices.

The rather beautiful explanation is almost certainly that both trends ride the same economic wave. When the economy contracts, people trade steaks for Spam (a perfectly sensible move that saved American dinners during the 2008 crash and its aftermath), and simultaneously, desperate financial circumstances correlate with drinking problems, substance abuse, and riskier driving. Add in population growth—more people means more Spam eaters and, depressingly, more opportunities for impaired driving—and you've got two separate but very human responses to the same underlying pressure. Between 2010 and 2022, Spam sales fluctuated between roughly 20 and 30 million pounds per year, a number so large it's almost impossible to visualise, though if you stacked that much Spam end-to-end it would reach, well, I'm not sure, but it would certainly be enough to make anyone reach for a drink.

What we're really looking at is two different symptoms of the same few causes—economic stress, demographic shifts, maybe seasonal variation in both comfort food consumption and holiday drinking—all dressed up in the entirely coincidental clothing of correlation. The data asks us nothing except perhaps why we are so eager to believe that canned meat and traffic fatalities are secretly friends. Both trends have calmed down since 2020, by the way, which is either reassuring or suggests we've simply gotten better at not noticing them.