No Sliced Bread

From an *American Heritage* issue some years back on overrated and underrated things:

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Invention

BY EDWARD TENNER [full disclosure: he's my brother--DT]

Most Overrated Invention:

Sliced bread. A late-1920s product that flourished during the Depression and was said to have created twenty-five thousand new jobs, it was technically sound: Moisture circulation in a sliced, sealed loaf is actually improved. But in the long run it helped put family bakeries out of business and promoted balloon bread. And none of several claimants to the invention appears to have made much money from it.

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/invention?nid=59637

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Challenge: During the Depression, family bakeries successfully lobby state legislators and Congress to ban sliced bread. Don't forget that a lot of legislation--e.g., Robinson-Patman--was passed in those days in the name of saving small business from the big, bad chain stores, etc. Furthermore, the technical advantages of sliced bread were not universally appreciated at the time. An article by Bernard De Voto in Harper's Magazine in 1939 stated that "The American housewife hates sliced bread with a heartening violence. She regards it as a scurvy trick of the bakers, a blatant device to make bread grow stale faster. She is right... [De Voto suggests that such housewives either patronize small bakeries or if that is not possible bake bread themselves at home]" http://harpers.org/archive/1939/07/unrest-in-the-kitchen/ So the passage of such legislation does not seem to me impossible.

Thus, in the US at least it will become impossible to speak of the greatest thing since sliced bread....
 
Now this is an alternative history I can get behind. Banning sliced bread leads to more small bakeries which leads to there being a place besides Wegmans or a donut shop that I can get fresh baked goods!

They apparently actually did this in 1943, though the intention was to cut waste during the war. It ended the same year because the law didn't stop the demand of the public for sliced bread, and thus didn't actually stop it's production just made it illicit (hehe, illicit bread). They ended up calling it an issue of public morale. However at this point sliced bread had been available to the public for over 10 years, so perhaps a movement initiated at the birth of sliced bread would be more successful. However I unfortunately believe that once the general public has had the convienience, it's gonna be nearly impossible to get rid of it; small bakeries just pre-sliced bread during the otl ban anyhow and between public demand and lobbying the ban won't last long. As a whole, the general public seems to prefer convienience over principle, though that doesn't mean it's entirely impossible, and the ban being in place for a few years might give small bakeries an extra push.

Apparently sliced bread increased the average Americans bread consumption both due to the thinner slices being less filling themselves and the ease to both eat just another slice and to make a sandwich. Perhaps fresh danishes, pretzels, and other flavored baked goods become somewhat more popular with sandwiches being slightly less convieniant? Perhaps we see greater innovation in small bakerie's due to more buisness?

An interesting effect of sliced bread was an increase in demand for jams and other spreads; this law might butterfly the popularity of PBJ's D=
 
Industrial scale bread making was already possible, and I don't see why family bakeries couldn't slice bread to order.

So why did industrial sliced bread drive them out of business?
 
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