“The best thing since sliced bread.” You have heard the phrase. You may have even used it. My retired neighbor, Ron, told me he remembered when sliced bread first appeared in stores in his Nebraska hometown.
“It was a game changer,” he said.
My daughter Sara and I immediately had questions. When did sliced bread become mainstream? Who decided Americans could no longer be trusted with a bread knife? I promised I would investigate.
First, a little history, courtesy of History.com: Humans have baked bread in one form or another for 30,000 years. Yet sliced bread did not arrive until 1928, when Iowa-born Otto Rohwedder invented the bread-slicing machine. Humanity survived the Stone Age, the Roman Empire and powdered wigs before deciding, “You know what? This loaf is too complicated.”
The Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune gushed that the average housewife could expect “a thrill of pleasure” upon seeing perfectly identical slices. The newspaper praised the bread as “so neat and precise” that nobody could match it with a hand knife. In other words, perfectionists everywhere were living their best lives.
Wonder Bread quickly embraced sliced bread, and sales exploded. Not surprising. The loaves were perfectly shaped, evenly cut and soft enough to make you believe chewing was optional.
Thinking about sliced bread led me down a rabbit hole of other sliced foods. Pizza. Cake. Pie. Deli meat. Cheese. Fruit. Americans apparently looked at an entire watermelon and thought, “Absolutely not. Somebody else handle this.”
And it is not just food. We slice golf balls into the woods, slice budgets in city hall and, in the 1980s, I even drank a soft drink called Slice. That is a lot of slicing for one civilization.
So, have we become too lazy to cut our own food? I am not sure. But I do know that many of us have lost the art of slicing bread by hand. I certainly have. Every time I attack a loaf, it ends up looking like it lost a bar fight. My dinner guests openly mock me. I usually recover by claiming I am “breaking bread” like Jesus did.
Meanwhile, I have learned that slicing bread properly requires patience, technique and a quality bread knife — which, I am told, is the best thing since sliced bread.
Sorry. I had to.
Have a fantastic Friday, and thanks for reading.
Shane Goodman
Editor and Publisher
Times Vedette digital newsletter
shane@gctimesnews.com
641-332-2707