That Time the U.S Banned Sliced Bread
People love the saying “this is the greatest thing since sliced bread” whenever something great comes along, but sliced bread had a tough few years at the start; a fire, rejection from bakers, and even being banned in the United States.
And it wasn’t even a keto thing
A Brief History of Bread
Before you can even slice bread, first you need unsliced bread and during the research for this article, I learned something completely new. What year does everyone think bread was first invented?
Was it in the 1800s? The 1200’s? 200 B.C.? Trick question, it was 30,000 thousand years ago, it was so long ago they didn’t even have years back then. The first evidence of bread was found in the Black Desert in Jordan and was more of a flatbread.
Fast forward several years and, by several years, I mean about 29 thousand 891 years to 1912. Bakeries are selling loaves of bread, families are buying them up and then slicing them themselves at home.
Slicing Bread
Enter our hero, multiple jewelry store owner, Otto Rohwedder, who, I assume was given a sandwich with uneven bread slices leading him to yell out “I will not stand for this!” Because in 1912 Otto Rohwedder sold his jewelry stores and began working on a bread-slicing machine prototype.
The sandwich was so bad it made the man sell everything and start a new business from scratch!
Otto would flip his shit if he saw this
Four years later, in 1916, he finally had a factory and a design for a bread-slicing machine that would revolutionize the world. But fate truly is a cruel mistress because just a year later a fire burned down his factory, including the blueprints for the machine. Otto was now right back where he started except without the money from his 3 jewelry stores.
But you can’t keep a good entrepreneur down. It takes Otto 10 more years of savings to be able to get another factory and machine built. How bad was that sandwich?!
Re-Slicing and Wrapping Bread
In 1928, while giving fate the middle finger, Otto files a patent for his bread-slicing machine including an update that will now also wrap the bread.
Unfortunately, bakers were apprehensive to purchase and use his machine. They believed slicing bread would increase the rate at which it would spoil even though the machine wrapped the bread in extra wax paper to mitigate this problem.
After 14 years of work do we think this bump in the road would stop Otto? Nope, he was able to convince his baker friend Frank Bench to purchase the first machine and within two weeks, Frank was able to increase his sales at the Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri by two thousand percent.
Two years later, in 1930, using Otto’s machines, the Continental Baking Company started selling their signature bread pre-sliced. You might have heard of it, Wonder Bread? By 1933 bakeries were now selling more sliced bread than unsliced.
More Bread, More Problems
Just ten years later in the midst of the Second World War, our villain of this story and a man with some really bad ideas, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard, decides to ban sliced bread on January 18th, 1943.
Statue of Claude R. Wickard… allegedly
It was a move that wasn’t really understood by many and caught a lot of bakers and families by surprise. Officially the reason given was to conserve wax paper but there wasn’t a shortage, and bread-making companies had enough wax paper to last several months, even without purchasing extra.
Some thought it may have been to conserve wheat but at the time the U.S. had stockpiled over a billion bushels of wheat that would last two years without a resupply. Finally conserving steel was another suggested reason since bread-making machines required steel to make and repair. But it wasn’t like bakeries and companies were constantly buying machines, they were designed to last years.
So people were not happy, and strongly worded letters were written and printed in newspapers that also questioned the ban. These days it would have been a trending topic on Twitter for at least 2 days.
Less than 3 months later, on March 8th, 1943, the ban was rescinded with Wickard stating, “Our experience with the order, however, leads us to believe that the savings are not as much as we expected…”
And that closes the saga of the perilous start sliced bread faced before it could become the pinnacle of great inventions.
Quick Facts
Since I’ll probably never write another article about bread, here are some extra bread facts:
In the late 1700s, rolled-up pieces of white bread were used as erasers for pencils and yes they would eventually spoil and rot.
The reason a baker’s dozen consists of more than 12, usually 13, rarely 14 is that in medieval times bakers were regulated to sell bread by weight and would be penalized if the dozen was less than the predetermined weight for a dozen. So in order to make sure they weren’t penalized it became customary to add an extra loaf to exceed the required weight. Like most sayings, there’s a lot of debate about whether this was the actual start of the saying.
The first automatic pop-up toaster that could brown bread on both sides simultaneously shared a mutually beneficial increase in popularity with sliced bread as it was released in 1925, 3 years before Otto Rohwedder released his first bread-slicing machine.
