Tempest in a Salad Bowl

When lettuce prices tumbled from $6 to $2.25 a crate last month, the growers of California's Salinas Valley, the "Salad Bowl of America," started plowing under half their big crop. For a few days, the plan worked fine. As lettuce became scarcer, prices stabilized. But then the Justice Department started an antitrust suit against the growers. Last week the trustbusters got a court injunction stopping the growers from destroying lettuce.

There was great irony in this action. By it, the legal end of the Government said, in effect, that it was illegal for lettuce-growers to do the very thing the Administration has been doing for years with potatoes.

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