Choking deaths on food in the US

It is a curious fact, and one that most people would prefer not to think about while selecting heirloom tomatoes, that as Americans have increasingly decided to buy their vegetables from people wearing flannel shirts in parking lots, they have also been choking to death on food at a remarkably consistent rate. The universe, it seems, enjoys a good symmetry. Between 2005 and 2021, these two entirely unrelated phenomena moved together with the kind of eerie coordination usually reserved for synchronized swimmers or celestial bodies, which is to say: perfectly in step with each other, for reasons that will shortly become apparent and then immediately vanish like morning fog.

What we are looking at, almost certainly, is the slow creep of American affluence and urbanization colliding with the simple fact that more people means more food-related accidents. As farmers markets bloomed—and we are talking about a genuine explosion here, from around 1,500 markets in 2005 to over 8,600 by 2021—the U.S. population grew by roughly 40 million souls, many of them eating more, living longer, and therefore having more opportunities to tragically miscalculate the diameter of a cherry tomato. Economic growth tends to push both prosperity (farmers markets) and longevity (more elderly people, who are statistically more prone to choking), while simultaneously the culture shifted toward fresh, interesting foods that older Americans might tackle with the same optimism as younger ones, but with notably fewer working swallowing reflexes.

So we are left with two datasets that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, moving in almost perfect tandem, which is either a testament to how thoroughly interconnected American life has become or a humbling reminder that correlation remains the universe's way of playing a practical joke on anyone paying attention. The farmers markets did not kill the people. The people dying did not require farmers markets. They simply grew more numerous together, like weeds and sidewalk cracks. Correlation is just loneliness looking for company.