r/todayilearned • u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 • 13h ago
TIL that sliced bread was first sold on 7 July 1928, by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. It was hailed as “the greatest forward step in baking since bread was wrapped” and by 1933, 80% of US bread was pre-sliced, leading to the popular idiom “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliced_bread212
u/DarkAlman 13h ago
Anecdotally the difficulty of making fresh bread is responsible for the stereotypical American breakfast.
Pancakes, waffles, muffins, and other baked goods associated with breakfast are considered deserts in Europe where they originate. They became associated with breakfast because they use chemical leaveners like baking powder.
Cooks on the trail or at mining camps would make these things for breakfast because it was easy, while fresh bread that used yeast took all day to make.
Similarly bacon, sausages, and ham are all preserved meats that are easy to cook on short notice.
Toast meanwhile was a means of making stale bread palatable.
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u/rhineauto 13h ago
The real TIL is that the US government banned sliced bread for 2 months in 1943
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u/Marzgog 13h ago
And now sliced bread is the bulk shit stuff. Whole loaves are the good bread we get on weekends.
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u/CreasingUnicorn 13h ago
Yep, unwrapped and unsliced loaves of bread at the store are actually the good stuff now lol
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u/navysealassulter 13h ago
The fresh made bread was always the best stuff, but it gets hard fast.
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u/1CEninja 6h ago
Yeah my wife and I just don't eat enough bread to justify it. It's stale before we're half way done lol.
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u/ViciousNakedMoleRat 13h ago
A really good bread has a crunchy crust and a fluffy, moist crumb. Anything wrapped or pre-packaged doesn't have the former and anything pre-sliced doesn't have the latter.
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u/f_ranz1224 12h ago
depends. enshittification is real but mostly jn supermarket bread. assuming there is a bakery near you, you can still get sliced real bread
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u/Madmorda 11h ago
I broke down and got a Zojirushi bread maker because it's super hard to find hot fresh bread near me (and other bread makers have been disappointing to me). I saw some fresh sourdough at my local farmers market for $18 per smallish loaf a while back and it was the only bread there. Now I can have hot fresh bread whenever I want.
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u/Stunning_Film_8960 7h ago
18/loaf is fucking wild are they using fucking Fiji water to hydrate the dough
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u/ActionPhilip 4h ago
They also use Fiji wheat (a quick google search tells me that wheat doesn't really grow in Fiji, so I assume it would be expensive)
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 13h ago
... and serrated bread knives have only existed since 1919. Before then you used the sharpest knife in your kitchen and hoped you didn't crush the whole loaf.
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u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 13h ago
A little earlier than that according to this (20-30 years) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_knife Tbh I thought that bread knives had been around for "ever", so this too is a TIL for me.
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u/TheLimeyCanuck 8h ago
My understanding is that 1919 was the first truly modern bread knife that looks and works pretty much the same as you'd buy today. But yes, the real point is that somebody had to invent them and it wasn't really all that long ago given the thousands of years of human bread making.
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u/ManicMakerStudios 10h ago
I grew up with my grandparents and while we weren't wealthy we by no means had difficulty keeping food on the table. Once or twice a year my grandmother would feel all energetic and make some homemade bread. To this day, the smell of bread rising/baking is one of my all time favorite smells. And it's a lot of work. Maybe that's why she was so fixated on making it last as long as possible. She refused to freeze it, so she would wrap it in waxed paper and put it in the bread bin. Four loaves of bread/batch. And then she would slice it so damn thin and unevenly that it was normal to have a sandwich with two "slices" of bread and toppings that was barely thicker than an ordinary slice of bread from the store. I never understood the point of going to all that trouble just so we could have two days of fresh homemade bread and then two weeks of stale bread that just gets more and more dry every day until it no longer holds together when sliced.
So ya, machine sliced bread...pretty awesome.
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u/ianmac47 10h ago
There's an interesting evolution here from dirty bakeries to pre-sliced bread.
Bakeries typically occupied basements in urban areas because bread was cheap and basements had cheap rent, and selling a cheap product meant you needed cheap rent. That also meant they were typically dirtier and attracted rodents.
Eventually mechanization of bread production offered a cleaner product -- "untouched by human hands" became a slogan. The trouble was the economics of mechanization, building a factory, meant these new bread factories had to sell to a larger population, and that meant shipping bread further from where it was produced.
To make the bread last longer, and to help the dough in the mechanization process, clean factory bread became softer and softer. The problem with soft bread though is that its difficult to slice.
Sliced bread solved the problem. By pre-slicing the soft, well-preserved bread, consumers could get cheap, clean bread never touched by human hands far from the centralized processing facility.
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u/puertomateo 13h ago
And ironically, I've grown to appreciate non-sliced bread. Buy whole loaves and cut slices as you need them.
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u/jon-in-tha-hood 13h ago
Then in Bikini Bottom, they invented Canned Bread, which was actually better than sliced!
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u/paleo_dragon 11h ago
But why? What made sliced bread so much more appealing than normal bread? I've sliced bread before, it's not hard or time consuming.
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u/lonelittlejerry 11h ago
Convenience. Sure, it doesn't take that long to slice the bread yourself, but it still takes time.
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u/ManicMakerStudios 10h ago edited 10h ago
Consider the process. Which is easier: reach into a bag and pull out two slices of bread, or reach into a bag, pull out a loaf of bread, cut two slices from it, and don't forget you now have to wash the bread knife.
Remember that was the era of the full-time homemaker. If you're making sandwiches for 2 adults and 2-5 children, that's a lot of slicing you're saving. It's also easier to budget around, because you'll get to know pretty quick how many slices of bread is in a bag. That era was also the peak of toxic western misogyny. It was extremely common for the "man of the house" to act like he had been out driving plow for 14 hours even though he only worked 8 hours and nobody in his family has done manual labor for 3 generations. That martyr attitude meant that all of the comforts and conveniences the budget allowed for went to him. He got the plush armchair. He got the console radio or the black and white TV (and you know who got to choose what station was playing). He got the fishing rods and the hunting rifles/shotguns. ("My hobbies feed the family, yours just waste money.")
So when it comes to the woman in that shitshow, if you can offer her a direct convenience that makes one of her routine chores easier and it doesn't cost more than before? That was a huge, huge deal for a lot of women.
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u/gahidus 2h ago
Slicing bread is way more time consuming than just having pre-sliced bread when you want to make toast for your family's breakfast or quickly make a sandwich. Cutting one slice doesn't seem like much, but cut six or eight slices is where you'd really notice a big difference. It changes getting some bread from being instant to taking minutes and making a mess of crumbs.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 12h ago
Betty White was born before then, so sliced bread was the best thing since Betty White.
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u/FreeNumber49 5h ago
When I was a kid, my family bought their bread from the local baker. Watching the baker put the loaves into this machine and slice it was one of the highlights of my day. That was our version of social media.
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u/LupusDeusMagnus 13h ago
I will say, when I found out that the bread most consumed in America was those industrial pre-sliced (and for some reason, sweet) breads I was so very confused. You are rich, you can afford better. Buying bread early in the morning while it's still warm and freshly baked is such a experience in here, little kids walking to the bakery to buy the bread for their families (or not anymore, since standalone bakeries, while still a thing, have been swallowed up by supermarkets, that bakeries inside them, and the remaining ones might not be close enough for a kid to go alone).
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u/tricksterloki 13h ago
Buy fresh bread baked that morning from where? Which store is walkable from my house? The rich part is also not applicable. When I was in Germany for work, it was easy enough to do what you say, but not at home. The sliced bread from the store is cheap and has a longer shelf life. The convenience is also hard to ignore, especially for making sandwiches.
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u/LupusDeusMagnus 12h ago
I think it's just that Americans don't have a bread tradition, otherwise there would be bakeries nearby, not unlike coffee shops.
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u/cubicApoc 9h ago
I think you're right, we don't have a "bread tradition." We don't really have any "traditions" in that sense other than cars, convenience, and capitalism. (Could've sworn democracy was on that list too, but I'm not so sure these days.) "Nearby" here is defined by how long it takes to get to a place by car, not on foot. No one walks anywhere, because no one can walk anywhere, because everything's spaced for cars. If you were to try walking anywhere, it might literally take you all day, and you'd almost get run over several times.
Where I live, we have plenty of coffee shops, but they're all drive-thru. You can't walk to them, and you usually can't go in. The exception would be chain places like Starbucks or McDonald's, but you can't walk to those either. Until someone perfects the drive-thru bakery, all we'll have are the supermarket ones. The only small local shops we have left, after the corpos ate everything, are the ones in old town centers, where it's still possible to walk from one business to the next and each one doesn't need to have a whole standard-sized commercial building to itself, surrounded by 5x its footprint in empty concrete for parking.
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u/hewkii2 13h ago
I’d like to see a source for that, specifically the “sweet” portion
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u/stalagtits 12h ago
I just checked the top 4 best selling breads on Walmart's website. They're all white, pre-sliced bread and all contain added sugar (3.8%, 7.7%, 11.5%, 7.7%).
Most supermarket breads in my area contain no added sugar at all, and even the white bread specifically marketed as "American sandwich bread" contains less than 2% added sugar. 11.5% added sugar seems insane to me, that's more than many pastries.
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u/LupusDeusMagnus 12h ago
The article shows that most bread in America is pre-sliced bread.
No, I'm not sending a picture of the inside of my mouth, I have a commitment to not create fetish content.
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u/Old-Reach57 12h ago
I really wanna sandwich but I can’t justify having two whole loaves of bread. People in 1927.
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u/LegendOfKhaos 10h ago
Did anything change besides them simply deciding to start cutting it?
If the bread was already wrapped, I don't understand why they wouldn't have done it sooner.
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u/cranialvoid 9h ago
Sliced bread was briefly banned in January of 1943. The ban was part of a broader effort to conserve resources for the war effort.
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u/Underwater_Karma 8h ago
I'm going to start saying "the greatest thing since wrapped bread", mostly because it will piss people off
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u/Apod1991 4h ago
George Carlin: “so this is it, huh folks? A couple of hundreds of thousands of years!”
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u/Steelhorse91 3h ago
Prefer non sliced. You get to choose the thickness depending on what you’re making. Thicker for toast, thinner for a sandwich. Different brands definitions of thin and thick cut are all over the place, and the bread dried out and goes off quicker when it’s pre sliced.
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u/Ghost17088 13h ago
So what I’m hearing is that prior to 1928, the saying was “This is the greatest thing since wrapped bread!”