The Smell of Rot Fills the Country
“The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
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 certificates — 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 quicklime, 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.”
When I first read Grapes of Wrath I was left with a combination of outrage and amazement — the same feelings that led the book to be banned and burned, and that led those defending the greedy and broken system described in the above passage to label Steinbeck a Communist.
But my outrage back then was mere shock at the past, which makes it more of a passive disgust at the faults of a bygone era than true outrage. We had learned from this, right? We’ve made progress since the Great Depression. After all, every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. Now is not then.
Today, 81 years after the Grapes of Wrath was published, the COVID-19 pandemic has left a quarter of a billion people suffering from hunger. Yet instead of the government stepping in to purchase food surpluses to feed hungry children, farmers are dumping milk and plowing over crops and wasting livestock because the universities, schools and restaurants that normally purchase large quantities of food are closed. This is madness. We’ve built a system of scale that only works at scale, our neighbors be damned.
We have short memories in America. The absence of political action and complete void of leadership that is now contributing to child hunger is a testament to the convoluted nature of the American system.
We’re better than this.
Right?
-AN
