Observer and Phil, the only missing piece of my puzzle is the specific use of creosote to make dumped produce inedible. The rest is common knowledge in the ag industry of the Central Valley of California. In recent years, the ag industry has prided itself in finding less wasteful ways of utilizing excess produce, but it is still common practice to withdraw excess produce from the market to stabilize prices. It's used for "cogeneration" of electric power, for animal feed, for organic fertilizer, and for countless other purposes.

But the California ag industry was in its infancy in the 1940s, and dumping was a common practice for disposal of excess produce to stabilize prices. If that dumped produce was easily obtained by scavengers, it could be sold at prices far lower than the market order, thus destabilizing the market. So, yes, it was common to mix produce with a noxious substance to make it inedible and unsaleable. To this day, there is excess produce everywhere in the Central Valley at harvest time - oranges and tomatoes strewn from open trucks at every freeway interchange. Excess produce is a fact of life in large-scale farming, and excess produce that gets into the black market is bad for business. Woody and maybe Steinbeck may have condemned dumping as a social evil, but I see it as "just business" when it isn't a time of famine. And there has been no famine in the rich Central Valley.

The only thing I couldn't document or observe myself is the use of creosote as the particular noxious substance used. Since creosote was cheap and readily available on every farm for wood treatment for fence posts and other wood, it certainly seems likely that farmers could have used it.

-Joe-