Lentil convexity

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So it turns out we haven't been panic buying lentils after all. There is a benign explanation for the sudden disappearance of split peas from the nation's grocery store shelves. And it is all to do with when seemingly gaussian distributions reveal themselves to be leptokurtic. Yes, you read that right.

This is all about kurtosis.

In ordinary times, our lentil-buying habits are regular: hippies and vegans (a small (but growing!) portion of the population) buy a lot of lentils, and everyone else buys none.

Well, they might have one tin, at the back of your cupboard, that someone got in a weak moment years ago, just in case of unexpected apocalypse.

The point is that in peacetime our lentil buying decisions are predictable and and mostly independent of each other: my lentil acquisition does not greatly influence, and is not particularly correlated with, yours.

National weekly lentil purchases therefore usually cleave to a normal distribution. A hippy