Per capita chicken consumption

It turns out that between 2002 and 2022, Americans got steadily better at two things: eating chicken and dying on bicycles, and they did both at remarkably similar rates. One might expect these variables to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, the way one expects a toaster to influence maritime insurance claims, yet here they are, moving in near-perfect tandem like a depressing dance partnership. The universe apparently decided that if we're going to consume more poultry, we should also increase our chances of being hit by cars while pedaling.

The real explanation, as it usually is with these haunting correlations, likely involves a third actor backstage: economic growth and urbanisation. As prosperity crept across the 21 years we're examining, Americans both ate more chicken (cheaper protein, industrial farming ramped up, restaurant chains proliferated) and cycled in cities more (urban renewal, bike-share programmes, environmental consciousness, the slow realisation that cars are terrible). We were also, crucially, adding roughly 2.3 million people to the country—more people means more chicken consumption and, proportionally, more cyclists meeting misfortune on asphalt. Neither chicken nor bikes caused the other; prosperity and population did the heavy lifting, and the statistics just waltzed along together like passengers on the same train who happened to keep the same schedule.

What we're really seeing is that two entirely unrelated ways of living move together because they're both symptoms of the same underlying social shift—we got richer, more crowded, more concerned with efficiency and health, and some of us bought bicycles while others bought drumsticks. The correlation is real; the causation is phantom. We humans are pattern-seeking creatures trapped on a planet drowning in data, which means we'll probably spend the next three years arguing about whether we should eat less chicken to save cyclists, missing the point entirely.