Choking deaths on food in the US

Between 2005 and 2021, US certified organic farmland grew from roughly 4 million to over 6 million acres, and choking deaths on food tracked upward with it at r = 0.9672, suggesting that the organic movement has a dark side that the farmers market pamphlets have not fully disclosed. The causal pathway is difficult to reconstruct: perhaps organic produce is chunkier, or perhaps people who care enough about food provenance to buy organic are also the people most likely to eat with the intensity of someone who really means it. Neither hypothesis has passed peer review, and this journalist will not be the one to submit them.

Both trends are upward-moving series from 2005 to 2021 driven by independent forces converging on the same 17-year window. US certified organic farmland grew as USDA certification became more accessible, consumer demand for organic products rose, and organic premiums made conversion economically attractive for farmers. Choking deaths, disproportionately affecting elderly Americans, increased as the over-65 population grew from 37 million in 2005 to 56 million in 2021. The two phenomena share a common temporal container and nothing else, but that container is long enough and the trends consistent enough to produce a formidable r-value.

Seventeen data points of two consistently rising trends will almost always produce r > 0.95, which is a statement about the mathematics of monotonic series rather than the world. The correlation between organic farming and choking deaths is a reminder that the universe does not curate its coincidences for plausibility.