Per capita mozzarella consumption

It turns out that Americans have been solving the drowning problem one mozzarella stick at a time, though whether the cheese is doing the drowning or preventing it remains genuinely unclear. The correlation is so tidy, so aggressively negative, that one suspects the universe is playing a practical joke on statisticians, the kind of joke that takes seventeen years to set up and then lands with the dull thunk of a wet log. We are a species that sees patterns the way a dog sees squirrels.

What's almost certainly happening here is that both metrics are riding on the same invisible wave: general prosperity and changing leisure habits. As Americans got richer between 2005 and 2021, they ate more cheese but also became slightly more risk-aware about water safety, installed more barriers around pools, and learned CPR from increasingly accessible YouTube videos. More disposable income meant more pool parties and more mozzarella consumption, yes, but it also meant better pool maintenance, more supervision, and the kind of casual access to safety information that would have cost hundreds of dollars in 1985. The per capita mozzarella consumption trend tracks population growth and urban density shifts pretty closely—we're talking about a doubling from roughly 2.5 pounds per person annually to around 3.5 pounds, a change small enough to fit in a decent handbag but large enough, apparently, to reorganise American water safety.

And so we arrive at the fundamental truth that patterns will cohere around anything if you squint hard enough and let statistics do the talking for long enough. Mozzarella and drowning deaths moved in perfect lockstep for seventeen years, which tells us nothing about mozzarella, almost nothing about drowning deaths, and everything about human beings' compulsive need to draw lines between distant points and call it fate. The correlation says almost nothing about causation, which is what we knew before, but somehow it's more vivid when the datasets are this embarrassingly mundane.