“American Dream”: Food loaded into Dumpsters while Hundreds of Hungry Americans Restrained by Police

[tclambert]

59. In a central scene in "The Grapes of Wrath," some farmers let their crops rot to keep prices up,

while hungry farm workers starved. The farmers spray oranges with kerosene, throw potatoes in the river, slaughter and bury excess pigs. They overproduced and to reduce the excess supply and increase prices, the market demands that they let food rot.

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." --from chapter 25

This struck me as a failure of our free market system. Here we had food available for picking. We had workers willing to work. We had hungry people who needed the food. And our banks and business people and the whole capitalist system could not figure out how to bring these ingredients together. The economics of the situation demanded that children starve to death with food rotting on the ground. The farmers had to, felt forced to, poison that food because the "invisible hand" of the marketplace could not allow people to have food for free.