US traffic fatalities

It is a curious feature of the universe that as Americans have grown increasingly concerned with their intestinal microbiomes, they have simultaneously grown increasingly skilled at removing themselves from the gene pool via motor vehicles. One might assume these two trends would be inversely related—that fermented tea drinkers would be the careful drivers, the ones signalling before lane changes. Instead, between 2010 and 2022, they moved together with the kind of eerie synchronicity usually reserved for separated twins and quantum particles. The kombucha market expanded by roughly 4,500 percent. So did the number of people killed on American roads, in a relative sense that is almost reasonable to mention in the same breath.

The likeliest culprit, of course, is that both trends are passengers on the same economic bus. The 2010s saw a sustained recovery and growth in disposable income and vehicle miles travelled—people had money again, and they drove. More driving meant more opportunities for the specific, terrible mathematics of collision. Meanwhile, kombucha transitioned from health-food fringe to grocery-store staple, riding the wave of the wellness industry's exponential growth and the simple fact that there were more people with more money to spend on fizzy fermented things. Population growth alone accounts for some of this: America added about 24 million people between 2010 and 2022, which is roughly the population of Australia. More Australians meant more drinks and more deaths, in perfect proportion.

What this teaches us is that the universe is not mocking us so much as remaining indifferent to our pattern-seeking while we remain terribly good at finding patterns anyway. Kombucha drinkers are no safer than anyone else. But they are everywhere, and so are we, and so are the roads. The roads keep winning.