THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 24

Slicing got easier too, as bakers realized that the wooden pins Rohwedder and Bench had used to hold
sliced loaves together were not necessary; the wrapper sufficed. By 1929, an industry report suggested
that there was practically no town of more than twenty-five thousand people without a supply of sliced
bread. Some bakers dismissed sliced bread as a fad, comparing it to other Roaring Twenties crazes like
pole sitting, barnstorming, and jazz dancing. Nevertheless, as bakers wrote in frantic trade magazine art-
icles, anyone who resisted the new technology would be crushed by the competition. 5
The Arnot Baking Company in Jacksonville, Florida, learned this the hard way. For two long years it
tried to hold out against the new technology, even as it hemorrhaged customers to bakers offering sliced
bread. Arnot reduced prices and increased the richness of its doughs, but still the company's unsliced
loaves lost market share. Finally, in 1931, Arnot installed a slicer and reported an immediate 600 percent
increase in sales. 6
By 1930, half a dozen companies manufactured commercial bread slicers, and by 1936, 90 percent of
the country's commercial bread was sliced. 7 The industry's conservative estimates showed that baker-
ies offering sliced bread increased sales 100-300 percent. Anecdotal reports spoke of increases of up to
3,000 percent. 8
While awaiting deliveries of mechanical slicers from hopelessly backordered manufacturers, bakers
asked themselves a logical question: What's so great about sliced bread? “Why does anyone want sliced
bread anyway?” one baker wondered in an essay for a trade magazine. “The housewife is saved one
operation in the preparation of a meal. Yet, try as one will, the reasons do not seem valid enough to
make demand for the new product.” 9 He had a point. How much extra work is it really to slice your own
bread?
Quite a bit, as it turned out. And the reason for this difficulty lay in the very processes of indus-
trialization bread had undergone in the preceding decades. Recall that in the 1920s, instead of baking
their own bread or buying it face-to-face from a neighborhood baker, consumers were increasingly pur-
chasing loaves from far-off factories. Instead of seeing, smelling, and touching bread directly, they were
picking up loaves sealed in hygienic wrapping. Despite all the emphasis on “knowing where your bread
came from,” consumers had no good way of judging when it had come. They needed a new way of
judging freshness, and they found it in squeezable softness. More squeezable loaves appeared fresher,
even if they weren't. Marketing surveys revealed that while consumers didn't always like eating soft
bread, they always bought the softest-feeling loaf. Softness had become customers' proxy for freshness,
and savvy bakery scientists turned their minds to engineering even more squeezable loaves. 10
As a result of the drive toward softer bread, industry observers noted that modern loaves had become
almost impossible to slice neatly at home. Without exaggeration and with only a little bit of whimsy,
we can speak of a messy collision between the preternaturally soft loaves of machine-age baking and
the dull cutlery of turn-of-the-century kitchens. Consumers, marketing experts, and baking industry re-
search all agreed: neat, perfect—toaster and sandwich ready—slices could only be achieved mechanic-
ally. 11
Practical considerations, then, played a key role in sliced bread's rapid acceptance. But what about
housewives' “thrill of pleasure when … first see[ing] a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact coun-
terpart of its fellows”? A little saved labor couldn't explain a thrill like that. How did this simple in-
vention become America's “best thing”? To understand that, we must return to the ethos of scientific
eating, to a different manifestation of the early twentieth-century veneration of industrial food. Sliced
bread may have endured because of the convenience it offered, but its immediate exaltation speaks to
something more visceral: a powerful emotional resonance between the spectacle of industrial bread and
a larger set of aesthetics and aspirations gripping 1920s America.