Per capita turkey consumption

It is a curious fact, and one that most turkeys are entirely unaware of, that as one YouTube personality's subscriber count has climbed toward forty million, the average American's consumption of turkey has declined by roughly a quarter pound per person per year. One might have expected these statistics to move in companionable parallel, perhaps both rising on the back of some great national enthusiasm for poultry-based content. Instead they are moving in opposite directions, like a couple who met at a party and have only now realised they have nothing in common.

The explanation, I suspect, has very little to do with MrBeast himself, and rather more to do with the fact that both datasets are responding to the same underlying shift: the slow, grinding transformation of American food culture between 2016 and 2022. As streaming platforms exploded and more people spent more time indoors consuming digital content rather than sitting around Thanksgiving tables, turkey consumption naturally declined. Meanwhile, the creator economy was rewarding exactly this behaviour—millions of people choosing to watch someone else eat on a screen rather than eat turkey themselves. The numbers are small enough to feel abstract until you realise this represents roughly 200 million pounds of turkey not eaten, enough to fill a modest warehouse, maybe two if you stack it carefully.

The real achievement here is not that we have found a correlation between an influencer's subscriber growth and poultry consumption, but that we have found yet another way to reassure ourselves that everything is connected, that the universe speaks in numbers, that patterns mean something. They probably don't. Turkey and MrBeast simply both happened to be moving in 2022. We just happened to be looking.