Per capita beef consumption

It is a curious fact about the universe that as Americans have gradually decided beef is either bad for them or expensive or simply less interesting than it once was, they have simultaneously become more interested in watching other Americans throw a ball around on television for four hours. One might expect these trends to move together—less beef consumption correlating with less interest in American pastimes—but the data suggests the opposite, which is the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether we're all just slowly backing away from something and calling it progress.

The most likely culprit is that we're watching two separate retreats from the same lifestyle. From 2002 to 2022, American beef consumption dropped from about 67 pounds per capita to 59, while Super Bowl viewership crept steadily upward from 86 million to 115 million viewers. What's actually happening is probably demographic and economic: younger Americans with less disposable income are eating less beef, yes, but they're also more likely to gather for free television events in groups—a Super Bowl watch party being the American equivalent of a medieval carnival, requiring no personal wealth beyond the ability to show up. Add in streaming technology making the broadcast more accessible, and you have two entirely different stories moving in opposite directions, like passengers on an escalator arguing about which way is up.

The lesson here is not that beef makes you antisocial or that football crowds eat less steak, but rather that the human mind is a pattern-recognition machine that will happily connect two completely independent declines if they happen to occur in the same two decades. We are all, it seems, rather good at seeing what we expect to see. The correlation is real. The connection is fiction.