Sliced Bread

On two months in 1943 when the United States government banned sliced bread

Friday, July 7th marked the 95th anniversary of the invention of sliced bread. The first sliced loaf was sold in 1928 by a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri. It was the greatest thing since, well, itself.

By the 1930s, a love of sliced bread had taken over America. These loaves were the epitome of American convenience.

A mural in Chillicothe celebrates the town’s claim to fame

However, in January 1943, about a year after the United States entered World War II, Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard instituted a ban on sliced bread. He said:

“The order prohibiting the slicing of bread [is] aimed at effecting economies in the manufacture of bread and in the use of paper.”

Claude Wickard, a man who did not seem to like sliced bread

The pre-sliced loaves required heavier wrapping to stay fresh, and the government saw this as an unnecessary use of resources during a time of wartime scarcity. Wickard also hoped the ban would keep bread prices down: The Office of Price Administration had just permitted a 10% increase on flour prices, so Wickard ordered bakeries to stop activities that would unnecessarily increase bread prices, such as slicing.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a big fan of sliced bread

When the ban was first announced, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said bakeries and delis with slicing machines could continue to use them. However, a few days later, the Food Distribution Administration clarified that the ban prohibited the sale of all pre-sliced bread. (It’s unclear if this clarification was a direct response to LaGuardia. The US Government claims it wasn’t.)

On January 26th, the New York Times quoted John Conaboy, New York Area Supervisor for the Food Distribution Administration:

In this announcement, Conaboy noted some severe punishments for ignoring the ban:

This policy did not go over well.

For instance, in a January 26th Letter to the Editor in the New York Times, one woman wrote:

Capturing the same sentiment, a Time Magazine article from February 1st read:

[To] U.S. housewives it was almost as bad as gas rationing—and a whale of a lot more trouble. They vainly searched for grandmother's serrated bread knife, routed sleepy husbands out of bed, held dawn conferences over bakery handouts which read like a golf lesson: “Keep your head down. Keep your eye on the loaf. And don't bear down.”

Then came grief, cussing, lopsided slices which even the toaster refused, often a mad dash to the corner bakery for rolls. But most housewives sawed, grimly on—this war was getting pretty awful.

Mayor LaGuardia again weighed in on the matter. In a speech on February 7th, he said he could not help “getting a kind of a chuckle” out of the situation. He went on:

This irony about the ban increasing resource use, particularly a demand for steel (a valuable metal for wartime needs), was also critiqued by a citizen in a January New York Times Letter to the Editor:

This turned out to be true. A February 27th Business Week article reported there was a “run on knives” now that housewives needed to slice their own bread. The article noted “cutlery wholesalers and retailers enjoyed an unprecedented run on knives — bread knives with serrated edges at first, then any kind of knife with a blade of seven inches or longer. The housewife took what she could get.”

In the face of the ban, American innovation raged on. Per the Business Week article, bakeries offered classes to teach housewives how to slice bread. And, clever Americans invented new slicing solutions:

However, even with these inventive ideas attempting to make home slicing easier, the uproar against the ban was still loud.

The government heard. On March 6th, only two months after the ban first went into effect, it was abolished. Wickard said in the announcement:

Most, though, posit the ban’s retraction had nothing to do with wax paper and was in fact a response to the public outcry.

There’s a lot wrapped in the wax paper of this story: We see the ingenuity of people, from the invention of the bread slicer to the gadgets that dealt with the ban. We see a wartime government quickly instituting a policy. We see people speaking up against this policy — and then the government, again quickly, reacting.

It’s a story of trying, failing, adjusting, and innovating. All within a little slice of American history.

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A note on that famous phrase: The phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” comes from the Chillicothe Baking Company’s first slogan used to market sliced bread. They said, it was “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” Then, later developments in the baking industry were often compared to sliced bread. Hence the phrase we know and love.