Most of the "we must destroy this food" stuff happens to control the pricing of food. If it's getting too cheap, they need to restrict supply so they start destroying otherwise good food.
This isn't as big an issue as it used to be in the bad old days of EU production subsidy. Most of the modern food waste is along the production and distribution chain, especially in stores when food has passed its use-by date.
Its common knowledge IMO, but you can certainly Google it. Agriculture is a near-perfect free market, so organizations and governments often destroy crops to raise prices.
How does government interference in a market make it near-perfectly free? The U.S. agriculture market is infamous as a source of government waste and pork barrel spending:
I don't think that's correct either. Many of the crops grown in the american west wouldn't be profitable if it weren't for huge subsidies. In the most egregious cases Californian farmers have grown thirsty, low value crops while their counterparts in the Southeast were being paid to destroy them.