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.
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.
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:
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
All first hand accounts of the dust bowl talk about sandstorms bringing sand, everything getting burried in sand. No first hand accounts seem to talk about fields getting stripped of soil, that was documented after the fact. This suggests that the source of the dust were fields that had been abandoned.
It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
>You can't have an excess of food and famine at the same time.
Sure you can. Food supply is not just a question of production, you also need logistics and will to distribute. There is currently a global food surplus, but areas of the world are still undergoing famine.
>in fact food prices were dropping
Up to 1931. If you look at the data into the actual Dust Bowl years, 1932 to 1936, prices go back up significantly.
>It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
But the Dust Bowl occurred in an extended drought period when Oklahoma was incredibly dry. And while it's true that topsoil was lost from fields that weren't farmed, those fields were fallow because of the drought - crops couldn't be grown in the dry conditions.
500mm isn't low by any means, it's moderate. Almost all Europe has around 500mm annual rainfall. It may seem low compared to let's say Mississippi, but that is because Mississippi is as wet as it gets outside the tropics.
The fields were abandoned because the prices were so low that cultivating them wasn't profitable. This in fact could have caused the drought as well, as much of the rain in such climates is recycled - the water that evaporated rains back down. And, it can't evaporate well without plants to bring it up from the soil, but only the surface dries out. This might have lead to the dried out top layes getting repeatedly blown away, until the fields got successfully overgrown, and the rains returned.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath