Forum Post: Augusta, Georgia: Police hold back crowd in near-food riot

By Eric London 1 April 2013

Police in Augusta, Georgia held back a crowd of hundreds of people who had gathered near an out-of-business grocery store last Tuesday in the hopes of collecting the store’s remaining food surplus. The crowd of three hundred watched in anger as the large pile of fresh groceries was thrown into dumpsters and carted away to rot in a nearby landfill.

.......

Throwing away food in front of starving families recalls the words of John Steinbeck, who described a similar scene in The Grapes of Wrath (1939): “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 … and in the eyes of the people there is a 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.”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/01/food-a01.html