The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
– John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25. This passage demonstrates the utter failure of the capitalist and economic system in California. Steinbeck write with deadly irony that agricultural science and technology can produce a bumper food harvest, but not the means whereby hungry people can eat it. Jobless migrants and the poor cannot afford to buy the produce. So much of it remains unsold and people go hungry. An inhumane capitalist system produces starvation in a land of plenty. The Pink Floyd song about the Great Depression, <em>Sorrow</em>, references the first line of the passage: "The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land / Plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden sky / A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers / But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking."