Mystery guest: “Fascinating, Phil - Joe and Mudcat feature in California newspapers of the '30'a and '40's.

Other way round. The “folk history” is absent from the document record until the 1990s and Mudcat. I searched, for anything, anytime even remotely related to:

“The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps."

are another protest by Guthrie. At the time, government policies paid farmers to destroy their crops in order to keep farm production and prices high. Guthrie felt that it was wrong to render food inedible by poisoning it in a world where hungry people lived.” [song wiki, check the footnote.]

Mentions linking Guthrie's “creosote dumps” lyric to crop poisoning, Federal subsidies, prices &c first appear here on Mudcat, nothing in the decades before that. Not even Guthrie or Steinbeck to be fair to the artists mentioned. It's just Mudcat and unsourced “everybody knows,” “common industry knowledge” & “seems reasonable to me” statements of “fact” as above and in the song threads.

Joe found the same, he recalls reading the sources but can't retrieve them now. Not even in the one (1) link provided. Nada.

The single reference he's located so far is the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 program that authorizes those same voluntary commercial grower co-ops. So we agree, I assume, up to the point that co-ops exist and there's no mention of deliberate crop destruction or Federal payouts in them anywhere. Zilch.

Absent any document record, we've waffled back down to how we treat food waste which, on the other hand, is not the same as wasted food at all. 2-10% of every harvest is inedible waste, cull and trash by law and industry standards. If you're good at it. Railcars full of the stuff and zippo to do with pricing, marketing orders, pilfering or safe, edible food of any kind.

This folk history meme has already devolved a long, long way from the song wiki and Joe's opening gambit in the song thread and I don't feel noways tired.

Next!