Organic egg sales in the US

It is a curious thing about the universe that as one bald man learned to scream at his camera with precisely calibrated urgency, America simultaneously began developing a passionate relationship with eggs that came from chickens treated with what one might charitably describe as consideration. The correlation sits at 0.966, which is the sort of number that makes statisticians nervous in the way that finding your doppelgänger on the bus would make you nervous. One would think organic egg sales and YouTube subscriber counts inhabited entirely separate dimensions of human experience, yet here they are, moving together like dance partners who have never met but somehow know all the steps.

The truth, which is rather less mystical, probably involves the fact that both trends are riding the same wave of broader American behaviour: rising disposable income, growing interest in health-conscious consumption, and the peculiar modern habit of finding celebrities who tell you to buy things while simultaneously doing increasingly elaborate stunts with money. MrBeast's growth tracks almost precisely with the years 2016–2022 when millennial and Gen Z consumers were consolidating their earning power and beginning to care about where their food came from, the way you might suddenly care about thread count when you've finally paid off a student loan. Between 2016 and 2022, organic egg sales in the US more than doubled, climbing from roughly 550 million dollars to over 1.2 billion—a figure so large it no longer feels like money so much as a description of a small country's annual mood.

What we have witnessed is not causation but rather two separate human impulses—the desire to feel virtuous about what we eat and the desire to watch someone else have more fun than we are—marching forward in perfect synchronisation, like soldiers who never received orders but somehow knew where to go. This is either a masterclass in hidden variables or evidence that human behaviour is far more predictable than we'd like to admit. Perhaps both things are simply what happens when you get richer and more anxious at once.