The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
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.
These paragraphs stuck in my mind when I read that book. We follow a family struggling hard to get the very basics, hell all they want is a shitty job, and then just a vivid image of mountains of food being melted because the economy. Heartbreaking, and still heartbreaking today.
Back when I worked nights at the shelter, part of my job was to go to the local Starbucks right before they opened and grab a couple of these bags to include with breakfast. It was actually very helpful to our program and the guests regularly ate everything before getting to the oatmeal and cereal. Thing is, to get these bags we had to reach out to the Starbucks ourselves, and come outside normal operating hours to receive them. Afaik the store wasn’t doing any outreach of their own, and the bags were probably being trashed before we asked for them.
Producing a lot of excess food isn’t enough - you need a distribution system capable of getting that food where you want it to go.
I know capitalism isn’t a perfect economic system with its excess of waste, but guess what, sweaty? It’s the only viable option. Under communism, there is no food to be wasted because there is no food to begin with.
I used to work at a food bank, and we couldn’t get rid of those damn things fast enough. We gave every person who came in like 2 of those bags. You could eat an egg sandwich and a cookie every day all week and still have plenty left over, and we still ended up trashing a lot of those
