Total US butter consumption

As Americans have consumed more butter, more of them have choked to death on food, a correlation of 0.990 that sounds like a warning against buttering your bread too enthusiastically and is actually just two smooth upward trends doing what smooth upward trends do. The butter returns to favor, the choking deaths rise with the aging population, and the chart slathers both in statistical significance without checking whether one has anything to do with the other.

Butter consumption grew from about 4.6 to over 6.2 pounds per capita as nutritional science rehabilitated saturated fats. Choking deaths rose with the aging population. Both are monotonically increasing across seventeen years, and the correlation is mathematically inevitable. Butter itself is not a choking hazard—it is, in fact, one of the smoothest foods in existence—making this correlation both impressively high and impressively absurd.

Seventeen years of butter and choking deaths is a correlation between one of the least chokeable foods and one of the most age-dependent death statistics. The butter softens, the population hardens, and the chart draws its line through both with the greasy confidence of a coefficient that has never eaten a meal. The butter is spread. The correlation is thick. The meaning is thin.