US traffic fatalities

It is a curious feature of the universe that between 2012 and 2022, Americans killed themselves in cars and drank plant-based milk with almost perfect synchronicity, as though the two phenomena were locked in some cosmic dance neither could abandon without throwing the other off balance. One might have expected these datasets to ignore each other entirely, perhaps exchange a polite nod at a party before drifting toward their separate corners. Instead they have stuck together like old friends who discovered they both hate the same thing, which in this case appears to be the concept of independence.

The 2020 lockdowns drove both a home-pantry boom — plant-based milk sales jumped as stockpiled breakfast goods went through the roof — and a counterintuitive rise in traffic deaths, as empty roads encouraged faster, riskier driving. Two data points from the same disorienting year, one from the grocery aisle and one from the highway.

We are creatures who see patterns everywhere, even between a pint of almond milk and a fatal intersection, and perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing if it occasionally reminds us to ask why we believe what we believe. The correlation is real, but the causation is a phantom, one of those friendly ghosts that lives inside statistical coincidence and never quite leaves. Milk does not prevent crashes. Neither prevents the other. They simply grew together in the American darkness.