Americans identifying as LGBTQ+

Spam—the canned meat product, not the emails—has been quietly riding the LGBTQ+ identification curve since 2012, correlating at 0.9666 across twelve years in a finding that Hormel Foods' marketing department is presumably too polite to acknowledge. As America became more openly itself, it also ate more processed pork shoulder, which is either a statement about inclusivity, comfort food, or the fact that both trends are downstream of entirely unrelated forces. Spam has always had a dedicated following. It is possible that following simply got more statistically visible.

Spam sales have grown modestly but consistently over the 2012–2023 period, driven by rising food prices making affordable protein more attractive, a nostalgia-driven premium Spam product line, and expanding Asian-American market penetration—Spam is a cultural staple in Hawaiian and Filipino cuisine, communities that grew over this period. LGBTQ+ identification grew for demographic and social reasons entirely unrelated to canned meat. Both series trend gently upward over a decade, which is sufficient to produce a high correlation coefficient when paired together, particularly with only 12 data points.

Two gently rising lines over twelve years will almost always find each other in a correlation matrix. The universe has no opinion on the relationship between self-identification and canned ham; only the spreadsheet does.