US maple syrup production

It is a curious thing about the universe that between 2005 and 2021, as Americans got better at extracting sweetness from trees, they got proportionally better at choking on food, the correlation between these two activities reaching a rather alarming 0.913, which is the sort of number that makes you wonder whether the universe is playing an elaborate prank on statisticians, or whether pancake breakfasts have simply become more dangerous.

What's actually happening here, almost certainly, is that both maple syrup production and choking fatalities scale with population growth and food consumption generally—more Americans means more syrup needed for more breakfasts, and regrettably, more opportunities to inhale food in ways that food was not designed to be inhaled. The US population grew from about 296 million to 332 million across this period, a 12 percent increase that would drag along everything from syrup gallons to unfortunate dinner incidents like a rising tide lifts all boats, including the ones taking on water. There's also the mundane fact that agricultural output and mortality statistics both respond to seasonal and economic cycles, and that anything measured year-over-year from 2005 onwards tends to correlate with everything else measured the same way, especially if you're not adjusting for the background hum of a society simply getting larger.

This is what pattern-seeking creatures do when given two datasets and a spreadsheet: we find meaning in the motion, even when the motion is really just two unrelated things jostling along beside a third thing we're not looking at. The maple syrup and choking data have practically nothing to do with each other, which somehow doesn't make the correlation any less real, just less useful. Sometimes correlation really is just correlation.