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Ah yes, the fabled "efficiency" of capitalism at work.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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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.
--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I read it for the first time recently and honestly no other book has ever had such a profound effect on me.
If you look at the state of the economy before the Great Depression, it's mirrored today. Just replace Hoover with Trump.
Eh, no. It's bad, sure, but we're a long way from the state of the economy right before the Great Depression. Here's an example:
Unemployment peaked around 25% in 1933. The worst of COVID was 14.8% in April 2020.
Housing. The cost of living. Underemployment. Unemployment. Gig work. It all sucks ass right now, but it sucked MUCH harder 100 years ago.
The answer today is the same as back then. Vote better.
In the 1930s the Labor force participation rate was almost 20% higher (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/lfp/US-Workforce-Since-1920). Then you factor in the underemployment and gig work you mentioned as well as how inflation has been a lie since the 1990s, and I'm not sure things sucked "MUCH" harder in economic terms. We do have better toys thanks to 80 years of NSF and other government funded science, but we're ending that now too.
One thing the author got wrong, that the coroners have must fill in starvation. It's not like that at all, coroners are shady as shit, in league with authorities, and have been sued by powerful interests, personally, for accurately including them in the cause of death. Like that taser company that now sells body cameras as well but not at all limited to them. John Oliver did a piece of this too.
We didn't learn shit during the first Great Depression. We won't learn shit this time either.
That should be a crime.
This makes me uncontrollably angry. You just don't kill trees without a good reason, and this is a horrible reason! Absolutely disgusting
Millions of peaches, peaches for me,
Millions of peaches, peaches for free.
Look out
He is a spider pig.
That ninja fight, and reverse tree jump were highly influential on me as a kid. It was the first time that I comprehended that putting one video clip quickly after another video clip lets to invent a narrative that the person watching just gets and you don't need to add story elements explaining the edit. Then, flying up into the tree??? I think that video alone is what jumpstarted my interest in film, photography, and editing.
I'm out of the loop on this one... What video is this?
From the article, it seems like they just have no way to process them. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see any sort of obligation to destroy these trees, they just need the farmland back to grow something they can actually sell.
The plant is still there and can process them but the demand has evaporated. The reason: Del Monte was fucking stupid.
Peaches are climacteric. When they ripen they naturally produce the plant hormone ethylene. This triggers a complex ripening process where aromas and volatiles are produced (aka flavor). It also causes rapid softening of the fruit and makes canning them much more difficult.
So what are clingstone peaches. These are peach varieties that have been selected for the down regulation of ethylene production and response. They are hard, sweet, but mostly flavorless, and do not separate from the seed (stone). They ship and process well because of their firmness but taste like shit.
So Del Monte produced good looking but shitty tasting product (extra tin can flavor) and the demand dried up over the years.
Why? Did this happen and why did they go bankrupt? They were allowed to become a regional monopoly.
North America is so fucked with these horrible monocultures, it's simply ridiculous.
Yeah but money! Oh...
I'm sure the executives who made those decisions still got to walk away rich while the workers and community get to deal with the consequences.
That's why they not only preferred the "heavy" syrup (aka sugar water, aka simple syrup) vs. natural jiuce. And worse, they started adding cherry extract to that, likely to add flavor to their flavorless peaches.
"Cherry extract" no doubt. I've worked in cherry processing and it's a crime against nature, they took perfectly good cherries and dumped them in vats with heavy syrup and swished them for hours, dried the cherries that now were empty husks filled with corn syrup and sugar, and presumably used the liquid from the vats as cherry extract, juice cocktails, and the like.
I don't even like cherries and that upsets me.
So gross. I have a cherry tree I planted about 7 years ago from a selling. Hoping this is finally its year to shine. It finally flowered enough to be.
So all of these trees are clingstone peaches and worthless for consumers?
Well consumers can eat them fresh, but they don't taste that good. They are slightly sweet with very firm flesh and that's about it. There's pretty much no peach flavor and often bitter flavors when you get close to the pit.
Can't say I blame them for trying. Selling larger, more robust, and flavourless varieties worked on us with both chicken and tomatoes. The first time I tried a garden tomato was eye-opening. Would love to track down one of the farms selling the old chicken breeds as well, but I hear those are pretty expensive.
Tomatoes have the largest difference in quality, people often think they don't like tomatoes until they taste good heirloom ones.
Store tomatoes are bred for firmness.
The original cardboard tomato contained the rin gene. This completely shutdown the production of ethylene. These tomatoes never turned red until ethylene gas was applied externally.
These types fell out of favor when varieties with down regulated ethylene response and production were developed. These types will turn red but are always firm and mostly flavorless.
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Out west especially they have warehouses where they replace all the oxygen with co2 and or nitrogen or whatever, to prevent that ethylene from causing ripening. The result is fruit never goes on sale in those places.
These types of buildings are used mostly for storing apples. They remove the O2 so that molds and fungi stop growing. It's not really to stop ethylene production which apples do not produce. Apples are harvested in August to October then stored and shipped year round. If you go to the store right now the apples you are getting are around 9 months old.
If they don't sell all of the apples before the next years crop, they dump them to diaries and feedlots.
eggs all in one basket
Capitalism at work!
Obviously the government had already ensured the food security of all of those in need first
lmao
What the hell do we do with peaches we can't sell!? They're completely useless now!
Worse, they exist only to lower the value of other nearby peaches. To preserve other people's peaches, the excess peaches must be destroyed. Tangible food is obliterated for an ideology.
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Be like the airlines. Another company just comes in and uses the existing peaches.
we have a loquat tree growing from old house they produce fruit quite prodigiously from time to time, and bees seem to love the flowers. 30+year. i think it was from a cutting, asian people love loquats.
Can't peaches be used to make alcohol? Is closing of canning plants with captive supply based on US immigration policies?
One of the farmshares near me is selling a “stone fruit” share. Maybe I’ll take a closer look
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