The other day I was slicing a big loaf of dark Italian bread from a bakery; it is a pleasure to carve thick hunks of hearty bread to ready for the toaster. While I was happily slicing the loaf, the all-American phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” popped into my head. So I started wondering, what was the problem that pre-sliced bread solved? Why was sliced bread so great?

Shouldn’t the phrase be “the best thing since penicillin”, or something like that?

What is so great about this thing we now take for granted? My thoughts cascaded down a sequence of notions about sliced bread. It is one of those ubiquitous things we don’t think about.

1. Maybe the bread they are talking about is fluffy white Wonder bread that crushes really easy. That might be hard to slice, and so getting white bread pre sliced is nice.
2. Maybe the bread they are talking about is not as tender as it is today, and it was actually tough to slice very thin for a sandwich. Buying pre slice saved embarrassment, and so in that respect it was a wonder.
3. Maybe it is hard to automate sliced bread, and while not that much of a selling point, maybe it took some technical innovation to make it happen. Otto Frederick Rohwedder, an American inventor, developed the first successful bread slicing machine in 1928, but it took some years for the invention to trickle into bakeries around the country.
4. Maybe this was a marketing ploy by commercial bread bakers, to sell a feature that becomes a necessity.
5. Maybe this phrase has always been said ironically. Maybe from the beginning everyone knew that sliced bread was a nothing burger, and it was meant to indicate that the new thing was no big deal.  Only later did the original meaning lapse and it become un-ironic.
6. Maybe it is still ironic, and I am the last person to misunderstand that it is not to be taken as an indicator of goodness.

Turns out I am not the first to wonder about this. The phrase’s origins lie — no surprise — in marketing the first commerical sliced bread in the 1930s. It was touted in ads as the best new innovation in baking. The innovation was not slices per se, but uniform slices. During WWII in the US, sliced bread was briefy banned in 1943 to conserve the extra paper wrapping around sliced bread for more paper for the war effort, but the ban was rescinded after 2 months because so many people complained of missing the convienence of slice bread — a time when bread was more central to our diets. With the introduction of a mass-manufacture white bread like Wonder Bread, the phrase became part of its marketing hype.

I think the right answer is 4 — its a marketing ploy for an invention that turns a luxury into a necessity. I can’t imagine any serious list of our best inventions that would include sliced bread, although it is handy, and is not going away.

That leads me to wonder: what invention today, full of our infactuation, will be the sliced bread of the future?

Instagram? Drones? Tide pods, Ozempic?

This is the best thing since ozempic!