During the Great Depression, farmers dumped milk in ditches while people starved

During the Great Depression at the turn of the 1920s and 30s, US farm prices fell so drastically that selling milk or grain often didn't even cover the cost of hauling it into town.

The twist that's hard to stomach from today's vantage point: some farmers chose to pour milk straight into roadside ditches, and others burned grain as fuel rather than sell it below the cost of producing it — while in those very same cities, people were genuinely going hungry.

The economic mechanism behind the apparent madness: it was a rational, if tragic, individual response to a broken market — and for some farm protest movements, mass-destroying surpluses was also a deliberate attempt to force prices back up by choking off supply.

The stakes: this paradox — destroying food right next to hunger — became one of the most cited examples of how market failure and a lack of coordination can produce an outcome that serves literally no one.