California almond production

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as California's almond farmers have gotten better at their job over the past seventeen years, Americans have gotten worse at the fundamental biological task of swallowing. The correlation is so robust (0.932, if you're counting) that one might reasonably suspect the state's entire agricultural output is somehow encoded with a subtle choking agent, which would be quite an achievement in food policy. But no. What we have here is simply two entirely unrelated phenomena that have decided to waltz together for no reason at all.

The culprit, almost certainly, is population growth—America added roughly fifty million people between 2005 and 2021, and California's almond industry scaled up to feed them. Almonds went from a niche snack to a dietary staple; by 2021, California was producing nearly three trillion of them annually (enough to give every American a small handful). Simultaneously, absolute choking deaths climbed because there were simply more people eating more foods, including almonds, which are genuinely among the choking-est foods a human can attempt. It's rather like noticing that as the number of stairs in America increases, so do the number of people falling down them.

This is what happens when you ask two independent variables to dance in the dark for long enough—they begin to move in tandem, not because one is leading, but because they're both being waltzed by some invisible third partner called 'demographic change.' California's almond production and American choking deaths are not lovers. They are merely two strangers who happened to walk the same direction down the same corridor. Neither caused the other, but both are very, very real.