Per capita margarine consumption

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a nation in possession of spreadsheet software must be in want of a correlation, and so we arrive at the peculiar discovery that Americans' devotion to margarine—that spreadable monument to the triumph of chemistry over butter—moves in perfect synchronization with postal workers being bitten by dogs, as if the universe were a petulant child arranging dominoes specifically to confuse us. The correlation sits at 0.918, which is to say it is almost certainly meaningless, and yet here we are, staring at it.

What likely binds these two trends together is not margarine's mysterious power to irritate canines, but rather the simple fact that both reflect the same underlying economic and demographic currents flowing through America between 2016 and 2022. Population growth in suburban areas—where both mail delivery density and processed food consumption happen to flourish—could easily push both metrics upward together, like two unrelated swimmers caught in the same current. Add to this the increased Amazon deliveries that kept postal carriers on longer routes (thus more dog encounters), combined with changing dietary patterns during the pandemic, and you have created the statistical equivalent of two people simultaneously deciding to wear the same absurd hat without ever consulting each other. Consider that per capita margarine consumption moved from roughly 0.95 pounds annually to just over 1.1 pounds, a shift that feels impossibly small until you realize that translates to roughly 315 million pounds more margarine spread across American breakfast tables.

The human brain, confronted with seven years of parallel data, will construct elaborate narratives to explain why spreadable fat and dog bites should waltz together through time, when the truth is almost certainly that both are simply responding to larger, invisible patterns we haven't bothered to measure. This is not a warning about statistics, nor a condemnation of curiosity, merely an observation that the universe enjoys a joke at our expense. Margarine and teeth remain strangers.