US gluten-free product sales

It is a curious feature of the universe that Americans have become precisely 94 percent better at avoiding bread at the exact moment they have become 94 percent worse at avoiding cars. One might expect these trends to diverge, to wobble past each other like ships in the night, but instead they have locked together in a kind of statistical waltz, moving upward in perfect synchronisation between 2008 and 2022. The cosmos, it turns out, is not interested in your expectations.

What we are almost certainly witnessing here is the long shadow of economic expansion and cultural anxiety moving across the same decade. Both gluten-free shopping and pedestrian safety are entangled with urbanisation, the rise of food consciousness, increased car ownership, and the proliferation of chain restaurants and big-box stores in places where people actually walk. Between 2008 and 2022, America's gluten-free market grew from roughly 280 million dollars to over 4 billion—that is a fourteen-fold increase, the kind of number that makes you visualise an entire Costco aisle materialising out of thin air. Pedestrian deaths, meanwhile, climbed from about 4,700 annually to over 7,000, which sounds smaller until you realise it is like losing the population of a small town to distraction and horsepower every single year.

The truth, as is often the case with Spurious correlations, is that both trends are probably riding on the same underlying currents of American life: more people, more traffic, more anxiety about food, more screens, more sprawl. We have learned almost nothing about gluten or roads, but we have learned something about how eager we are to mistake the shadow of a trend for its substance. Perhaps that is enough.