US olive oil consumption

It is a curious thing that Americans have spent the last seventeen years simultaneously developing a passionate relationship with olive oil—that golden Mediterranean nectar of sophistication—while also, and with what one can only describe as grim consistency, choking to death on food at an accelerating rate. One might imagine these two variables occupying entirely separate corners of human experience, yet here they are, moving together like dance partners who have never met but cannot seem to let go. The universe, it seems, has a sense of irony that Douglas Adams would have recognised immediately.

The explanation, warm reader, is almost certainly boring: both trends track population growth and demographic aging. As America's population swelled from 296 million to 331 million between 2005 and 2021, more people were eating, and more people—particularly elderly people with weaker swallowing reflexes—were eating food that could obstruct their airways. Olive oil consumption exploded during this same period because of rising incomes, Mediterranean diet enthusiasm, and the simple fact that there were more people with disposable income to purchase a five-dollar bottle of extra virgin anything. The elderly population grew by roughly 6 million people in this period, and older adults account for a wildly disproportionate share of choking deaths—something like 65 percent of fatal food choking incidents occur in those over 74. Both trends are essentially saying the same thing: America got older and richer, nothing more sinister than that.

And yet here we are, you and I, having just noticed that olive oil and choking deaths move as one, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes human pattern-recognition feel both miraculous and slightly embarrassing. We are creatures who will spend an afternoon marvelling at a correlation and wondering if the universe is trying to tell us something, when really the universe is just doing algebra with demographic data. Perhaps that's the real correlation worth examining: the one between how badly we want meaning and how creatively we can find it in unrelated statistics.