Nemo: “A search of California newspapers from the Steinbeck/Guthrie era for "Creosote" or "creosote and crops" & other variations might actually turn up something germane.

Go for it & report back to the class...”

I did, before my first post on the subject, and all roads lead back to… Mudcat, with Joe Offer leading the village parade.

David Carter (UK): “Not someone who does their research at the end of a keyboard and gives talks in village halls.

Jim Carroll: “Seems this thread if becoming Redneck-Troll infected.

Gawduh forbid you should have to communicate with an actual farmer on the subject of farming at some point in your clueless opinionating. Joe should have found beechwood creosote is still an approved food and drug additive (it's not coal tar crosote) but never has been for peaches or any other fruit. It's controlled by the Feds.

Marketing orders are from voluntary grower co-ops. They couldn't order denaturing if they wanted to.

So-called “excess” table grade fruit is not destroyed. It is down graded. There are no quotas for juicing, canning and sileage.

Just because you can eat it, doesn't mean it was grown for you to eat. There are perfectly valid mechanical and manufacturing uses for vegetable oils, vinegar &c that are none of your beeswax.

And Joe... and all of Mudcat for all its existance… is, apparently, unaware of that portion of the harvest set aside for the hungry since the Old Testament was new:

“And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 23:22)

If Steinbeck had really cared about human suffering Grapes of Wrath would have been set in Euro-Asia and plenty of more his characters would have to die before "The End."

Ask a redneck about the Society of St. Andrew if you actually care about the truth. Avoid Mudcatters like the effing plague.

Hate, ignorance and hero worship, what could possibly go wrong? Boy howdy.