Per capita chicken consumption

Over the course of twenty-one years, Americans ate steadily more chicken and were hit by steadily more cars, a pairing that raises the question of whether poultry consumption impairs peripheral vision or whether the chickens are simply crossing the road in greater numbers and taking us with them. The correlation is 0.949 across two full decades, which is the kind of statistical relationship that would get published in a journal if the journal had no editorial standards whatsoever. Why did the pedestrian cross the road? Presumably not for the chicken.

Per capita chicken consumption in the US has been on a long, slow climb since the 1960s, rising from about 28 pounds per person annually in the early 1990s to over 98 pounds by 2022, driven by health-conscious consumers switching from red meat, the fast-food industry's embrace of chicken sandwiches as a cultural battleground, and the simple economics of poultry being cheaper to produce than beef. Pedestrian fatalities, meanwhile, rose for different but temporally overlapping reasons: more urbanization, larger vehicles, higher speeds, and the smartphone-driven distraction epidemic that began around 2010. Both trends are essentially measures of a growing, urbanizing, consumption-driven America, moving upward together not because one drives the other but because the same demographic engine powers both.

Twenty-one data points is enough to make any correlation look authoritative, and this one wears its authority with the quiet confidence of something that means absolutely nothing. America eats more chicken every year and walks into more traffic every year, and the two facts are connected only by the accident of sharing a country and a century. The chicken, as always, had its own reasons for crossing.