Remember that allocation of resources, whether it's fuel or peaches or oranges, can only be good or bad with respect to a specific distribution of wealth. If you accept the distribution of wealth during the great depression, you should also accept that it was a good allocation of resources - at that point at least, once the overproduction was already done - to douse mountains of oranges with paraffin and leave them to rot in the sun, as Steinbeck recounted in "The grapes of wrath".

(Even with the ideal foresight to not produce those oranges in the first place, the people who wanted to eat them still wouldn't be able to eat them.)

You should realize - even when they themselves don't - that when people complain about wasteful destruction of e.g. food, what they're really complaining about is the distribution of wealth that made this destruction the sensible thing to do.