Per capita margarine consumption

It is a curious feature of the universe that Americans have apparently been drowning in swimming pools with the exact same enthusiasm they've been spreading margarine on their toast, a correlation so tight (0.931) that one might reasonably wonder whether margarine itself has developed some sort of aquatic vendetta. The data suggests that for seventeen years running, between 2005 and 2021, these two entirely unrelated human activities—the consumption of a butter substitute and the prevention of staying afloat—have moved together like dancers who've never met but somehow know all the same steps. One feels compelled to ask what cosmic joke is being made at our expense, though the universe, as usual, is not returning calls.

Margarine consumption's long decline took a small 2020 uptick as lockdown baking went mainstream, and swimming-pool drownings spiked the same year as unsupervised backyard summers stretched on. Neither has much to do with the other — they are incidental travelers on the same pandemic train, one from the pantry and one from the patio.

What we're witnessing is not a warning about the dangers of spreadable fats but rather a rather humbling reminder that human statistics tend to move in herds, all of them responding to invisible economic winds that push populations, preferences, and fatal outcomes in the same direction simultaneously. The margarine and the drowning deaths are not speaking to each other; they're both listening to something else entirely, some deeper rhythm of American life that correlates with everything if you squint hard enough. Neither of them knows the other exists.