THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 23

“Artisanal,” Davis argued, is a commitment to integrity, not the use of any particular technique. He
pointed to La Brea's insistence on slow, cool fermentation to build rich flavor and texture out of just
flour, water, starter, and salt. La Brea could easily speed up the line by turning up the temperature to ac-
celerate fermentation, eliminating the loaves' long sojourn in a cool retarding room, or adding chemicals
that condition dough to higher speed mixing and rougher handling. It won't. And, Davis admitted with
a note of pride, the company has lost several major contracts because of this commitment. Unlike most
large bakeries, he explained, La Brea has changed its machinery to conform to and nurture the delicate,
living nature of bread, rather than adjusting its bread to suit the requirements of efficient automation.
Moving steadily along its assembly line, the dough looked, felt, and smelled just like what I make at
home.
Awed, I asked Davis how La Brea's industrial-artisanal power might affect small bakeries. Would it,
Goliath-like, annihilate the country's fragile new culture of local baking? What were the environment-
al costs of transporting frozen bread thousands of miles? Davis had answers to those questions, but by
then I was lost in my own reverie. The idea that a company like La Brea could make high-quality bread
accessible to a much broader group of people intrigued me. “If you have a good small artisan bakery in
your neighborhood or town, by all means, buy your bread there,” Davis insisted, “but unless they live in
San Francisco or someplace like that, most people just don't have that kind of access.” La Brea loaves
still cost more than standard store-bought fare and appeal to a relatively narrow band of consumers, but
what could it become? Was this a model for a future of artisanal-industrial abundance, a technological
fix for the failings of our food system?
It seemed improbable, but then that reminded me of another watershed moment in industrial baking
that appeared equally inconceivable in its time. Perhaps by delving into the political life of another mo-
ment in which industrial abundance, once deemed impossible, felt just within reach, I can gain some
purchase on my dream of affordable artisan bread in the United States. And, in the process, we can un-
derstand a bit better the hidden costs of seeking technological fixes to food system dilemmas.
THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD
On July 6, 1928, what would become the world's first loaves of automatically sliced bread steamed
out of the ovens of the Chillicothe Baking Company in northwestern Missouri. The slicing machine's
inventor, Otto Rohwedder, unappreciated and down on his luck, had achieved something nearly every
member of the industrial baking establishment thought impossible. Retail bakers had used machines to
slice loaves at the point of sale for years, but few people in the industry believed that bread could be
automatically sliced as it came off the assembly line. Bread was too unruly. What would hold the sliced
loaves together? How would slicing affect the chemistry of taste? What would prevent sliced bread
from rapidly molding or staling? Many bakers actively opposed factory slicing. Otto Rohwedder's initial
design for a five-foot-long “power driven multi-bladed bread slicer” dated back to 1917, but he found
no takers for the idea and had almost given up hope. For Rohwedder's friend Frank Bench, owner of
the Chillicothe Baking Company, installing the machine was a favor and a last shot in the dark. Bench's
bakery was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy—what did he have to lose? 3
The results astounded all observers. Sales of sliced Kleen-Maid Bread soared 2,000 percent within
weeks, and a beaming Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune reporter described housewives' “thrill of pleas-
ure” upon “first see[ing] a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows … def-
initely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand.” 4 The news spread rapidly. Sliced bread took
off first in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, then spread throughout the Midwest by late summer 1928. By
fall 1928 mechanical slicing hit the West Coast, and appeared in New York and New Jersey by October.