California almond production

It is a curious fact, and one that has probably not escaped the notice of anyone who has ever bothered to think about it, that the more almonds California produces, the more Americans seem to fall out of bed and expire in the process. One might assume these two phenomena operated in entirely separate universes—one involving irrigation schedules and harvest yields, the other involving the treacherous gap between mattress and floor—and one would be wrong. They move together with the sort of eerie synchronicity usually reserved for long-married couples or synchronized swimmers.

The most likely culprit is the boring one: population growth. As America's population swelled from 296 million to 331 million between 2005 and 2021, both almond acreage and elderly people who might fall out of bed increased in rough proportion. But there's also something else happening here, something almost conspiratorial in its tidiness. California's almond boom coincided with the rise of the aging Baby Boomer population—people who were simultaneously eating more almonds (a trendy protein source for the health-conscious older American) and, ironically, becoming more likely to suffer the nocturnal mishaps that can follow a lifetime of accumulated fragility. To put it in scale: California now produces enough almonds in a single year to give every American roughly one pound, which is approximately the weight of a medium-sized cat, which is also approximately what you might land on if you fell out of bed at precisely the wrong angle.

What we have here is not evidence of causation but rather a masterclass in what happens when two independent trends share the same underlying driver. The almond industry and bedside mortality statistics are rather like two flowers blooming from the same root system, neither one responsible for the other's growth, both simply responding to the same ambient conditions. It is, in its way, rather comforting. Humans will align anything with anything.