When sliced bread was first invented in 1928, it scared people.
The small town of Chillicothe, Missouri was the first place in the world that saw the
commercial use of a bread-slicing machine, and the local papers reported that the very
idea was “startling.”
Otto Rohwedder, the guy who decided to combine the power of bread with the magic of slicing,
had to take out full newspaper ads carefully walking people through the daunting steps
of eating sliced bread, such as “opening the wrapper at one end” and “removing
as many slices as desired.”
Eventually, though, people got the hang of it, and sliced bread became the greatest invention
since sliced bread—Wonderbread, the first major brand to start slicing their bread,
soared in popularity, and by the early 1930s—only a few years after its invention—nearly 80%
of all bread sold in the United States was pre-sliced.
Everything was looking great for the future of sliced bread, but then, in 1943, for a
harrowing 47 days, the US made sliced bread illegal.
Why?
Well, it’s a bit of a long story.
In the 9th century BCE, a group of Chinese monks combined saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal
in an attempt to create a life-extending elixir, accidentally synthesizing what would later
become known as gunpowder.
Next thing you know, it’s World War II.
Things are really bad.
Not only is Hitler fully alive and doing stuff, but the cost of consumer goods is skyrocketing.
International shipping lanes are interrupted, and manufacturing resources around the world
are diverted away from producing consumer goods, and toward producing…
axes, or whatever it was that people were killing each other with.
Now, when this economic crisis finally hit the US, the American government did what they
normally do to combat a collapsing supply chain and out-of-control inflation: absolutely
nothing.
Oh wait, sorry, wrong century.
No… this time, they did something radical: FDR issued an executive order creating the
“Office of Price Administration,” which, essentially, completely transformed the way
that the US economy worked for years—you couldn’t just walk into a store and exchange
money for goods and services anymore; the entire capitalist system got a shiny new makeover.
Now, the simplest thing that this office did was place price caps on basic commodities—about
90% of retail food prices, for example, were frozen.
You couldn’t legally sell a package of Jell-O for more than eight cents, or a box of Bisquick
cake flour for more than 21 cents.
And even if you were especially impressed with the package of Bisquick, you couldn’t
legally pay more than 21 cents for it, either.
But this is where things get a little more complicated—economics are not as simple
as freezing the price of Jell-O, kicking your feet back, and hoping that everything just
kind of sorts itself out.
There’s a little thing called “supply and demand,” which, if you don’t know
what that means, you can find out really quickly by going to reddit.com/r/libertarian and saying
that Starbucks baristas should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment.
Since the OPA was essentially dictating the prices for commodities that were already low
in supply, they also needed some way to curb demand.
And since it was seemingly impossible in the 1940s to convince people that Jell-O honestly
just isn’t that good, demand had to be curbed artificially.
This was done with the creation of a new currency: ration points.
The US government distributed these ration booklets to every household in the country,
and every month, consumers were given 64 “red points” and 48 “blue points,” which
would entitle them to buy certain things at the grocery store.
Red points could be used on things like meat and dairy, and blue points could be used on
canned or dried foods—once you were out of points for the month, you couldn’t legally
purchase those things anymore.
Now you’re probably wondering: what does this all have to do with sliced bread?
Well, an important caveat of this rationing system is that not every food was rationed;
certain basic staples, namely bread, were heavily relied on during these years, and
made up the bulk of peoples’ daily calories.
This meant that for the federal government, keeping bread prices down was particularly
crucial to keeping people alive.
But in early 1943, the OPA was forced to authorize a 10% increase in the price of flour, which
all you bread-heads out there might recognize as one of the main ingredients in bread.
Now, the OPA wasn’t too keen on jacking up the price of bread, given that that might
kill everybody, so the Department of Agriculture stepped in with a solution: make it illegal
to pre-slice the bread.
Sliced bread was slightly more expensive to produce than unsliced bread, given the extra
equipment and manpower, so banning sliced bread would theoretically offset the increase
in flour prices.
This would also save approximately 100 tons of alloyed steel and the extra wax paper that
was needed to keep the sliced bread fresh, both of which were sorely needed by the military
at the time.
It was a win-win for everybody, and by “everybody,” I mean just the federal government, because
everyone else was super pissed.
Bakeries were, naturally, not thrilled that they couldn’t use their expensive new bread-slicing
machines, and housewives around the country protested; this woman wrote to the New York
Times 10 days after the ban, complaining that 22 slices of bread was, arguably, too many
slices to slice in a day, and that she was also pretty bad at it.
Less than a month into the ban, TIME Magazine declared that, “this war was getting pretty
awful,” and that was entirely in reference to the sliced bread thing, with zero mention
of the six million people who had been killed up to that point.
That’s how bad it was.
By March 8th, only 47 days later, the government decided to lift the ban, claiming that it
was because it didn’t save as much wax paper as they had anticipated, but we all know it
was because they had infuriated a bunch of women who now knew their way around a knife.
Okay, so funny story, my team and I were researching this video while we were traveling abroad
and it turns out that trying to use American websites with facts about…
America stuff… sucks when you’re traveling.
Back in 2018, the EU rolled out a new set of internet regulations to protect European
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