Per capita egg consumption in the US

Americans have been eating more eggs and getting hit by more cars with a consistency that suggests the nation has made some kind of Faustian bargain involving breakfast and crosswalks. Over eighteen years, per capita egg consumption and pedestrian fatalities have moved upward together with the cheerful indifference of two trends that have never met. The data is scrambled, if you will, in the sense that it is impossible to separate the signal from the noise when there is no signal to begin with.

Egg consumption in the US declined for decades as cholesterol fears kept Americans away from yolks, but reversed course around 2012 when nutritional science quietly rehabilitated the egg—the 2015 Dietary Guidelines dropped its cholesterol cap, and suddenly omelets were back. Per capita consumption rose from about 248 eggs per year to over 280 by 2022. Pedestrian fatalities rose during the same window for entirely unrelated reasons: SUV dominance, higher urban speeds, distracted driving, and insufficient pedestrian infrastructure. Both trends are being powered by different cultural engines—one by nutritional science, the other by automotive engineering—that happen to have accelerated during the same decade. The eggs are innocent.

Eighteen data points of eggs and pedestrians walking in lockstep is a reminder that the universe produces coincidences at industrial scale, and we are biologically compelled to interpret every one of them. The eggs did not cause the fatalities, the fatalities did not cause the eggs, and yet here they are, marching together across a chart. Over easy does it.