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

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THE STREAMLINED LOAF

Consider the precise symmetry of the sliced loaf, each of its pieces “the exact counterpart of its fellows.”

Calibrated within a sixteenth of an inch, the loaf's tranches articulate a perfect accordion, a white fanned

deck. Note the plane of the slice. Each face reveals an intricate lacework unmarred by aberrant holes.

There are no unneeded flourishes, no swags added by the baker. If we could, for a moment, let go of

our postmodern attachment to the roughed-up and irregular landscape of artisanal bread, the sight would

take our breath away. Industrial bread exudes a modernist aesthetic, and it didn't get that way by acci-

dent.

During the 1920s and 1930s, an obsession with machines and progress changed the look of America's

material life. Streamlined design channeled a love of industrial efficiency into the nooks and crannies of

Victorian frill and Craftsman style. It began with vehicles—smoothing, tapering, and lengthening their

lines to help them slip efficiently through air. It was a seductive look, all speed and glamour, and it

spread quickly to objects with no need to foil drag. Irons, pencil sharpeners, and kitchen mixers got lean

and smooth. The country's first pop-up toaster, the 1928 Toastmaster, looked like an Airstream camper.

Even vegetables got remade in the image of rocket ships. As historian Christina Cogdell notes, “Carrots

were being transformed [by plant breeders] from 'short chubby roots' into 'far' more 'attractive' 'long

slim beauties.' ” 12

Bakers responded to this trend by smoothing out bread's bulges, squaring off pan bread's flared “bal-

loon tops,” and lengthening loaves into Zephyr trains. Industry experts believed that “stubby, plump

loaves of bread, the old fashioned design” would increase bread consumption because their slices were

broader and thicker, but they were forced to accept consumers' desire for streamlined loaves. “Skinny

bread is here to stay,” a gathering of professional bakers confessed in 1937, and, from Charleston, West

Virginia, to Kingsport, Tennessee, bakeries touted the sleek design of their loaves. In advertising im-

ages of bread from the 1920s and 1930s, loaves look for all the world like Bauhaus office blocks or

Le Corbusier chairs. 13 This was more than just a visual style. It was a political statement about the fu-

ture. Tellingly, at the peak of the streamline aesthetic in 1938, a food industry expo in Zanesville, Ohio,

presented a loaf of sliced bread under the theme of “Utopia.” 14

This combination of food, technology, and the future would not have seemed unusual. At the turn

of the century, Americans' appetite for utopian thinking seemed limitless. Hundreds of utopian mani-

festos and novels filled bookstores, utopian clubs debated the means of achieving progress, and utopian

communities sprang up, attempting to turn the dream into practical reality. Of all the writing on uto-

pia, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward captured the country's imagination most. In the 1888 novel,

which remained popular for decades, Julian West, a young Brahmin of Gilded Age Boston, falls into

a deep sleep and awakens in the year 2000 to find the United States transformed into a socialist uto-

pia. Centralized factory production meets all human needs and resources are publicly owned. People are

educated, long-lived, and free to pursue whatever leisure activities they desire. War and crime have dis-

appeared. As West explores this new world, he comes to understand how cruel and inefficient his own

era was. Looking Backward was a not-so-subtle indictment of robber barons, speculation, and greed, a

paean to cooperation and redistribution. It sparked Bellamy Clubs, inspired experiments in collective

living, fueled growing interest in cooperatively owned enterprise, and sold more copies than almost any