[ninjin]

For those of us not reading widely enough and/or not being raised in the American literary tradition, the quote is from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" [1]. I have long been aware of the work, but reading this quote makes me regret not having read it yet.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath

[Anotheroneagain]

There was a (massive) excess of food during the depression, so that is likely made up.

[TeMPOraL]

Interesting, given that I remember from history lessons that it was more-less exactly as quoted.

Curiously, this also happens today. Grocery stores dump a lot of perfectly good food and other goods, and some of them figure that it can't be that someone dumpster-dives instead of buying, therefore they instruct employees to make the trash unusable. Example I've seen first-hand was when throwing away a perfectly good box of laundry detergent, they would open it and spill it into a container of perfectly good fruits and veggies, to make both unusable.

I'm not a freegan, but I knew a few at some point, and the stories I heard even in my local area, makes the quote feel 100% believable.

[isomorphic]

That particular passage, perhaps; however one can certainly believe growers destroying an abundance to control prices. It certainly doesn't sound like the purported overabundance of food was evenly distributed:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/02/johnsteinbeck....

[Anotheroneagain]

That piece was written literally by the same person.

Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. It was the time when people developed the habit of eating meat daily, as people were buying out the food, and fed it to animals. There wasn't at any point a famine.

It's a tall tale.

[ivanbakel]

>Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell.

And the originally-quoted passage is about farmers destroying crops as part of price controls due to overproduction.

Could you provide any kind of evidence that the supply of food was evenly shared? Steinbeck spent a lot of time with impoverished farm workers before writing the Grapes of Wrath, so I'm inclined to believe his description of them.

[Anotheroneagain]

So, farmers destroyed their crops and starved. Is that how you understand it?

I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction, when all real accounts show food prices almost halving in a decade, in fact I would be willing to speculate that the dust storms that came were in fact caused by the abandonment and large areas being left unsown, with no cover to hold the soil together.

[ivanbakel]

>So, farmers destroyed their crops and starved. Is that how you understand it?

Wealthy farmers destroyed crops that weren't worth the money to sell, yes, and poor farmers went under. That's not a surprising idea, given that it continues to happen in our modern farming system all the time during periods of overproduction.

>I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction

But you might be compelled to give some counterproof to Steinbeck's non-fiction reporting, which was also linked above.