Organic food sales

It is a curious fact, and one that appears to have gone largely unnoticed, that as Americans have grown increasingly concerned with the provenance of their lettuce, mail carriers have grown correspondingly safer from the teeth of small dogs. The universe, it seems, does not appreciate irony so much as it appreciates a well-timed inverse relationship. One might almost think the dogs themselves were reading nutritional labels.

Here is where things get properly strange. Both trends likely ride on the back of economic cycles and changing residential patterns between 2016 and 2022: as organic food became mainstream and less a signifier of particular zip codes, suburbanization patterns shifted, mail carrier routes evolved, and the demographic most likely to keep aggressive dogs (lower-income rural and exurban households) moved in ways that reduced postal contact. Add to this the slow adoption of better bite-prevention protocols by USPS, some combination of shifting dog ownership demographics, and the fact that organic food sales tracked alongside general economic recovery—all moving in opposite directions simultaneously, like dancers who never met but somehow stayed in step. The numbers suggest that roughly 2.3 million organic food transactions in 2016 corresponded with about 6,000 dog bites annually, while by 2022 the organic market had bloomed to perhaps 4 million transactions against fewer than 4,000 bites.

What we have discovered is not that kale prevents dog attacks, but rather that two completely unrelated phenomena can synchronize beautifully if you squint at them from exactly the right angle and ignore everything else happening in the world. This is either deeply reassuring or mildly concerning. Probably both. The dog bites stopped, but the lettuce kept coming.