“At the time no one understood it, but sliced bread it became a kind of edible little promise of a better world, “wrote Aaron Bobrow-Strain, author of the essay. White bread, a review of the history of this basic product of the basket that today we take for granted but that was, at the time, a small social revolution.
The sliced bread we consume today is one of the later creations of modern capitalism. Despite its simplicity and obvious advantages, the invention story has more crumbs than it appears. Before their arrival, the housewives ordered weekly loaves from their trusted bakers, loaves that the family consumed either chopped into large homemade slices or directly bite-sized, unceremoniously, by busy men without much desire to cut.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Otto Rohwedder, an American engineer, was on the trail of a machine that would free housewives’ arms from the arduous process of daily slicing. However, in their conversations with the bakers, they told him that they did not see that any device could supply this daily action: if you sliced the bread, it would end up crumbling, and it would barely last a day without mold, since the part of the crumb, when coming into contact with the air, it was beginning to go rancid at high speed. A dilemma with no apparent resolution.
Rohwedder was not convinced by these comments and went to work.
He led the process of creating a machine that could slice bread with determination. Although he finished a first final prototype in 1912, it was eaten in a fire and it would take another 15 years of his life to develop it again. Called it Kleen Maid Sliced Bread, and only managed to associate with a baker from St. Louis, Frank Bench, to test your invention. No one else was interested in her, and if Bench did it was because she was on the verge of bankruptcy and had no alternative to differentiate herself from the competition.
The slice in our lives
What follows is history.
After three years, it is estimated that 80% of the bread consumed throughout the United States came from sliced bread, with the United Kingdom coming its hegemony in the mid-1950s. At the beginning, and to maintain an aura of purity, the The automated packaging process included the addition of metal wires that held the sides of the loaf together so that the breadcrumb area was always closed, so as not to spoil.
In his research process, Rohwedder consulted hundreds of housewives to find out what the consistency was and the desired thickness of the slice. As time went by, the creators realized that they could make an ultra-soft bread, softer than anyone in their home could slice with a kitchen knife. In addition, the myth of healthy white bread was created, which took decades to disprove.
According to Bobrow-Strain, in a matter of a handful of years Americans began to consume about a third of their calories in the form of bread, and the bakery that did not sell this product ran the risk of losing all its customers. Thus arose a whole electrical and culinary sandwich industry, nonexistent until then. Recipe books were coming and also, for the first time, toasters. It was here too that they bloomed jams and creams to spread, to such an extent that this is how one of the most typically North American dishes was promoted, the peanut butter sandwich with raspberry jam.
If during the promotion of the Kleen Maid Sliced Bread the product was seen as “the greatest step forward in the baking industry since packaging was invented”, an expression that probably derived from these advertisements took hold in popular lore: when something new causes a sensation, it is said to be ” the best since sliced bread. ”It was one of the key indicators of the turning point in the mechanization of everyday life: Only after the success of sliced bread would engineers be encouraged to automate other areas of domestic work.
Perhaps the best way to explain to what extent a comfort became necessary with another anecdote.
In 1943, US officials imposed a short-term ban on sliced bread as a resource-conserving measure in times of war. The plan was to discourage ordinary people from buying sliced bread in favor of the one that remained united so that less bread would be thrown away (and, therefore, less wheat would be needed to be harvested) and that the loaves last longer at home. Among the thousands of letters that were sent to the newspapers of the time, Wikipedia rescues the letter from a housewife sent to The New York Times on January 26 of that year:
I would like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and sanity of a household – my husband and four children are in a hurry during and after breakfast. Without the sliced bread, I have to slice the toast myself. At two pieces for each of them, there are ten slices. At lunchtime I have to cut at least twenty slices by hand as I make two sandwiches each. If I want to eat a sandwich afterwards, there are twenty-two slices of bread that I have to cut in a hurry!
The Americans had wasted their time chopping up their bars. The common citizen was no longer going to allow progress to be renounced, whatever the cost. On March 8, and in view of the political cost that the measure was causing, the ban was lifted.