Avocado consumption per capita

It is a curious fact, and one which the universe has apparently decided to document with the patience of a bored accountant, that as Americans have grown increasingly devoted to spreading mashed green fruit on their toast, postal workers have been bitten by dogs with measurable reluctance. One might have expected these two variables to move independently through spacetime, indifferent to one another, like most things. Instead they have chosen to move in almost perfect opposition, which suggests either that guard dogs have developed a sincere hatred of avocado cultivation, or that something stranger is afoot.

The most likely culprit is not, sad to say, canine sophistication about agricultural trends, but rather the simple fact that both variables track the same underlying story: demographic and economic shift. Between 2016 and 2022, avocado consumption climbed largely in dense urban cores where younger, wealthier populations clustered—the same populations who tend to live in apartment buildings with doormen and indoor dogs kept at a gentler remove from mail carriers. Meanwhile, rural and suburban areas, where dogs still roam with Shakespearean freedom, were becoming relatively smaller pieces of the postal pie. It is rather like watching two symptoms of the same invisible illness move in opposite directions simply because you are measuring them in different rooms of the same house.

What we have here is a 93% negative correlation that is almost certainly not a correlation at all, which is precisely the sort of thing that makes pattern-seeking creatures like ourselves both enchanted and quietly uncertain about what we think we know. The avocados and the dog bites are simply two different ways of measuring where Americans have decided to live. We have constructed an elaborate statistical monument to our own migration patterns, which is either deeply meaningful or completely pointless, and we will almost certainly never know which.