Choking deaths on food in the US

It appears that Americans have discovered a new form of sympathetic magic: by installing electric vehicle charging stations, we are somehow convincing fewer people to asphyxiate on chicken. The universe, one might think, would have better things to correlate—yet here we are, watching choking deaths and EV chargers move in perfect lockstep for twelve years, like a couple who've grown so accustomed to each other they no longer need to speak. One begins to suspect the cosmos is testing our pattern-recognition skills specifically to watch us fail.

The real culprit is almost certainly prosperity, that tide that lifts all boats and also, it seems, prevents them from sinking while eating. Both trends reflect the same underlying economic expansion across the 2010s: as Americans got wealthier, they bought more electric vehicles (which require the infrastructure to charge them), and simultaneously became better at not dying mid-meal through improved healthcare, dental work, and frankly better food safety. The EV charging network grew from roughly 5,000 stations in 2010 to over 40,000 by 2021—a dramatic expansion that shadowed rising healthcare spending and decreased mortality across the board, including from such preventable misadventures as choking on food.

What we're witnessing is less a causal relationship and more a pair of passengers on the same accelerating train, each convinced they're the engine. The correlation whispers that we should be suspicious of our own pattern-finding brains, those magnificent machines that insist on seeing significance in the synchronized twitch of unrelated phenomena. Two datasets, twelve years, one unsettling reminder: we're all just passengers.