Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Sliced Bread

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why sliced bread is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Sliced bread, known for being tasty. Fymus for being the best thing since it's all, I guess. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why sliced bread is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host,

Lady Golden, Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of sliced bread? I mean, I like it. I am a big toast person. Oh, yeah. Italy is not the best place to be a sliced bread fan. There's a lot of really amazing bread.

Not a lot of amazing sliced bread, I got to say. In the U.S., you go to a grocery store, and they have about 100 types of sliced bread that you can get. That doesn't exist here. Some might say that it leads to a more peaceful life where you're not always thinking about what kind of slice bread to get but personally

I like freedom and to me freedom is being able to choose between 100 different types of slice bread I learned a really interesting thing about slice bread a few weeks ago which is that if it smells like nail polish remover it's it is bad

it has gone bad nail polish removal yeah so like it can have an acetone smell i thought i was worried that i had like gone crazy or something so i i had brett take a whiff of it and he was like that's awful why would you make me smell that i was like well i was just checking it like sure i'm not uh going losing it like that my nose isn't just suddenly decided that bread smells like acetone but yeah it's uh yeah it's bad uh so that was something i didn't realize that could happen to bread i i found that out because that only happened a couple weeks ago. I'm on like a little hiatus from bread until the trauma of the weird smelling bread goes away.

And then I'll be right back at it again, I think, having bread. You're on like the bread injury list. Right. Doubtful for next game. And then I'll upgrade you to probable. Sure. I'm benching myself for now, coach. But I'll be back to eating sliced bread in a few weeks. The team doctor's like waving back out under your nose saying what happened.

Right. Unsliced, though. Yeah, and I want to thank a wonderful listener, DC Prox, for suggesting bread in the polls. And that did well in the polls that as a topic today. Also, as I researched, I found we have past sifts that covered a lot of the fundamentals of bread because we've done baking soda and we've done yeast in particular. Yeah. And also some others about other foods like maize and stuff that can be bread ingredients. So this one will talk about some further bread fundamentals as well as sliced bread because the other big bread category to talk about is a thousand different regional and cultural traditions of breads. And one of them we can cover is sliced bread, which is really fun.

Like the grocery store package of bread. Not going to cover every single type of bread from every single culture on the world in what, like an hour and 20 minutes? Yeah, yeah, there's so many. And so these sliced bread, it turns out it's a lot more sift than I expected. And it's always been in my life because, yeah, my relationship to it is basically I grew up on it. We always had sliced bread from a grocery store that feels kind of mass produced. And then I didn't know that has some preservatives in it to make it last longer. And so then the first time I got like bakery bread, I was really mad that it went bad sooner.

Yeah. Because it does. Yeah. That's also probably why I got this like weird bread. Like, I've never had this happen in the U.S. And then I'm like, wait, why has this never happened in the U.S.? And then I realize it's probably because the bread has more preservatives in it. Which, you know, I don't, I'm not like, I'm not automatically anti-preservative.

It just depends on what kind of preservative. I mean, salt is a preservative, right? So it's not, you know, sugar is a preservative. So, like, it really depends on what it is. But, yeah, it's interesting. You got a favorite sliced bread type? There's a couple brands I like, and then I tend to buy the one that's on sale. But yeah, I tend to try to get one that is like weaty or grainy seeming rather than a white bread.

Yeah. No, same. Which is more of a modern take than the like earlier in the 1900s U.S. take. Oh, that's. And we'll talk all about that today. Having weedy, seedy breads is more modern? Yeah, we basically swung from bakery bread to big loaves of white sliced bread, like a wonder bread. Right.

To, oh, I still like sliced bread, but I want it to seem like it was made by some kind of artisanal baker too, you know? Right. So like the more rustic it is, actually, the less historic it is. Yeah, it's like imitating history. Yeah. Let's talk all about that because it gets into our first number. And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics, this week that's in a segment called, I want a stats and numbers all night and fun math every day.

Yay. Did I do that? I don't know. Do you right? I don't know if my tongue is sufficiently long. Right. The band Kiss has some physical and anatomical issues that seem to work for them. Sure.

And that name was submitted by Carla Parsons. Thank you, Carla. We have a new name for this every week. Please make it a silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. And the first number is three because there are three basic parts of a grain of wheat. I'm looking at this grain. Sliced bread, this especially U.S. idea, it tends to be wheat bread, even though it can be other things.

Look at this little freak. And yeah, this is the simple science behind. a ton of descriptors for bread. If you've heard of white bread or whole grains or bran muffins or something, it's all just referring to this one thing. My favorite source for this is the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, which is a joint project of NC State University and NCA&T State University. They say a grain of weeds three parts. Here are the three parts. They are the bran, the endosperm, and the germ. The bran, the endosperm, the germ. Right.

And I listed those from like the outside into the middle. We'll link diagrams. The bran is the outer protective layer of wheat. It's full of fiber and B vitamins. Like in Game of Thrones. If you eat a brand muffin, you'll just start inhabiting a cool canine in the woods. Yeah. I watched some of that show, so that makes sense to me.

And then the second thing, the endosperm is most of the middle of the grain. And it's mostly starch and then a small amount of vitamins and mineral. And then finally the germ is inside of the endosperm, like a little nesting doll, like a tiny seed in the middle. And according to food scientist Ashley Avery, the germ is, quote, the baby plant inside of the grain. If you were to plant a wheat grain, that is the part that would sprout. And it is packed with E and B vitamins as well as healthy fats, proteins, and disease fighting phytochemicals. Yeah, because like a seed is basically a plant egg, I would say. like where you have the bran is sort of the shell, the endosperm is kind of like the white of the egg,

and then the germ is the yolk. Yeah, it's egg logic. Yeah. The individual grains of wheat, humans really prefer to process them in order to get nutrition and food out of them. So grinding them into flour is how we begin to make pretty much everything out of wheat. The other quick number is for the four basic ingredients of like a loaf bread are. flour is most of the material in it, and then yeast and water and sugar. Right.

That's a loaf of bread. We talk about this on the yeast episode, but it's like, yeast could just get in the dough and the flour, and then you're like, huh, this bread is really nice and fluffy without even having to, like, worry about putting the yeast in. The cells of the yeast joining up with the wheat and everything else, that's how you get bread. And if you've ever heard of something being whole grain, they are saying it has all three of those parts of a wheat grain.

The bran and endosperm and the germ were all turned into flour together. And then if you've heard of white flour to make white bread, that's usually just the endosperm. So they remove and potentially discard two other whole parts of the grain. The bran and the germ get either discarded or turned into different foods with different characteristics. Right. And it's generally less nutritious, right? because you have carbs, you have a little bit of protein, but not much. And you would otherwise be getting a lot of stuff from the germ and the brand.

Yeah. That's also why if you're having tummy issues, white bread is good because it doesn't have fiber or other difficult to digest things in it. It's just kind of the packing peanuts of the food world. And that can be helpful when you have an upset tummy. Yeah, yeah. Everything with nutrition is basically tradeoffs. And so if you break grain down to just one part of it, which is mostly starches, then you get something potentially lighter in texture, potentially tastier.

And then also missing the huge amounts of especially B vitamins that are in the rest of the grain. I don't know. I don't like white bread all that much. There's too much nothing going on. I don't really like it. I love sourdough, though. That's a good. Does that count as white bread?

Maybe the added element of the bacteria culture. So it can work either way. Huh. Yeah, you can make it with either kind of flour. Right. You've had white sourdough. I've had whole wheat sourdough. It's both delicious.

It's just whatever people want to do. Yeah. That's what I really miss sliced sourdough bread. I cannot find it easily here at all. The Trader Joe's like where they have the big loaf, but it's like these weird things. they're really hard to fit in your toaster. That's the kind of bread I want.

I miss it. Yeah, take that toaster. We've also done an episode about toaster. I'm focusing on sliced bread because we've done a lot of elements of bread. It's so fun to talk about bread on the show. We could have just, you could have, this could have been secretly incredibly bread, the podcast, the entire podcast. Yeah. Sib.

Yeah. And then every week, it's us, but in big aprons and a fun hat. That would have been fun. Why didn't we make that show? Yeah. All our gear is like covered in flower fingerprints. You know, like it just gets everywhere. Yeah, it really does.

Yeah, and so the simple three parts of a grain are almost everything about what your flour is like, which is almost all the bread. And so all the differences between various current sliced breads in the grocery store, it's often that thing. And then also, of course, beyond the basic four ingredients of bread, people also add additives, preservatives. The additives tend to improve flavor, texture, preservatives, extend shelf life. We are not doctors or food scientists, and everything in nutrition is tradeoffs. So the main thing we can say is most countries have a regulator that tests all food safety. So if you eat sliced bread in the U.S. from a store, the food and drug administration said it's all safe. Yeah.

Which while they're still around, I guess that counts for something. Yeah, and like pre-20-something something, they were pretty put together as an organization. Yeah. You know. There are fewer preservatives and bread here in Italy, and bread goes bad very quickly. Yeah. Bread from a bakery goes sale, and it can get rock hard in like two days. So, you know, generally speaking, American suburbs and grocery stores,

like where you have to drive to the grocery store and bring a bunch of stuff back. People don't want to be going to get bread every other day. So that's the preservatives. Yeah, it's definitely not a scheme. But, you know, it's like, it does. Yeah. It's, yeah. Well, we should do like a whole episode on like preservatives, like a separate one.

Yeah, we won't go a lot deeper on them. They're kind of their own thing. Yeah. Also, they weren't the very first approach to making sliced bread a sellable product. The next number is an invention date for sliced bread. It's a loose date, but the number is 1916, the year 1916. That's when an American named Otto Rowetter built his first prototype of a bread slicing machine. Ooh, I'm looking at it.

This is like bread torture. This is like saw for bread. It almost looks like a newspaper printing press or something. Yeah. But for tormenting a loaf. Yeah. I really like the diagram. One big chop.

And I really like the annotation here. Alternate knives move up and down. Fresh loaves conveyed to slicer. Slicing knives. And there's an arrow to some slicing knives. And then sliced bread delivered. Yeah. So this is very, very clear.

Most of the steps are knives. Knives, yeah. Conveyor belt to knives. Bread goes past knives, knives. turn bread into slices. That knife sells to customer. The knife tries to put on a name tag and a uniform. Yeah.

Do not stick arm in, tested and rejected. And yeah, one source this week is economics writer and communicator Zachary Crockett, who wrote for Prysonomics about Otto Rowetter. Also, before the name Americanized, it might have been Rovetter. He was born in 1882 German immigrant parents in the Midwest. And as a young man, he ran a small chain of jewelry stores in Missouri. He got into the jewelry business. And then he became super passionate about finding a way to sell loaves of bread that are already sliced.

So he sold off his chain of jewelry stores to raise capital to fund his own development and invention of machinery. I just love the idea that this guy's got like a jewelry store. He's surrounded by all these precious gems. and he's just like drawing bread, bread, bread, bread. He's like so obsessed with bread. It's the piece of the story I want way more details on because the best guest seems to be that in the jewelry business, he met women.

And then women talked about like homemaking and wishing bread could be more convenient, but that still seems weird as a chain of events. I don't know. Sounds like this bread king listened to women. Yeah. The other salad piece of evidence for that is that he surveyed, women for how thick bread slices should be. Nice. See? This is what happens when you actually listen to women and there's a specific preference for how thick the bread should be sliced. You make a knife machine

and invent sliced bread. This is also very like Wallace. This is also very Wallace and Gromit coated this machine. Like, you know what I mean? It is. Yeah. It must have seemed that way. Yeah, it must have seemed like, why is this man building a shoot that fires him into his kitchen to put his pants on? Right. You can just put your pants on. Well, yeah. And Wallace and Gromit have a toaster where, like, there's like a toaster, it pops the toast up, and then there's a trebueche that shoots the jam at it. Splat.

And it all is very synchronized very precisely. And if something goes wrong, you're going to get jam at your face. But yeah, this is like that. This is, yeah, definitely Wallace energy. Now I want Otto Rofetter to have a grommet so badly. Yeah. Who's just blinking and concerned as it tries to eat his arm. A silent, rational dog who judges you with his very subtle expressions.

Every inventor needs one of those. Yeah, I like that he was so interested in what people actually want. He took out several advertisements in major newspapers to run a widespread survey purely to find out the ideal width for bread slices. The fun number there is he got 30,000 responses from women. Maybe men too. It's hard to tell. But he specifically targeted it at women.

And with their combined wisdom, he milled his machine to cut bread slices of a width of 12.5 millimeters. I was going to say that. That's the right size. And it's like just short of half an inch. I'm surprised he didn't go actual half an inch, like a very American measurements-oriented person. Every millimeter makes a tangible difference in the mouth. It really does. Yeah.

And also, to me, a very heroic invention story because Otto Roweetter was not born rich and overcame huge difficulties. He had no safety net when he sold off his jewelry stores to have capital to invent. he got a warehouse filled it with hundreds of blueprints, built a few prototypes, was all like doing heroic, invent this solo stuff. And then in 1917, the warehouse burned down. Oh, no. Lost everything. That must have smelled really good, though, all that toast. Oh, right?

He's like, put out the fire, and the firefires are just like, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yeah. They're not. They're too busy eating toast. Because he lost everything, he needed to take a day job. He just was a low-level employee at a finance advising business, saved as much of every paycheck he could. And then for 10 years, painstakingly got enough capital for new experiments and engineering to build a better bread slicer. And then after that, no one would buy the machine or work with it. I love this machine just looking at it.

So I don't know what they're on. It's just an incredible bread guillotine. With so many knives. Yeah, yeah. It's also like sort of upright piano shaped to me, but it's like five feet wide, three feet tall. It's not quite as big as a piano, but it's big. Yeah, it's like an organ that, like a pipe organ that would slice your arm into 12.5 millimeter slices. Yeah, and he barely managed to convince one baker to try it by also becoming one of his partners in an enterprise for slices.

Bread, try this newfangled Wallace and Grammet-ish innovation. In 1928, he found a partner in the small town of Chilli Coffee, Missouri. Baker Frank Bench was about to go bankrupt and said, I'll try anything. So sure. And allegedly, the numbers too, like neat and tidy to me, I don't totally trust it. But allegedly when Frank Bench started selling pre-sliced bread using this machine, his sales went up 2,000%. Wow.

It's too neat of a number. Yeah, that seems like a lot of bread. It's just cute to say it was 2000. But either way, they were successful for real. It went up. 2,000% is kind of actually an insane number. I don't actually believe that. That's too much.

Well, if you do the actual math, that's far, it would be overwhelming. Yeah. Then you would build more Wallace and Gromut machines to be robot employees and stuff, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But either way, it was a hit. They made a lot of money. and this popularized rowwetter's machine and the wild number there is within five years

sliced bread was a national U.S. products. Wow. This really was the phenomenon you've heard it was. This guy knew. He was like he had a dream and he was like, people are going to be crazy about this. I know it. Yeah. He really, like he was correct to abandon apparently four small jewelry stores in Missouri and just sell those off for capital.

Like he had the right idea. Sometimes inspiration strikes and you just know, sort of like I have this idea for like an apple fork where you put the apple on the fork and then you hold it and you eat it off of it so that when you're eating the apple, your hand doesn't get sticky. That name is so pleasant. It's two things I understand. I'm willing to trust it. I have no apples and no forks. Right. And you don't like sticky hands.

No one does. I'm trying to podcast. I already have flour all over my hands. If that gets sticky, I'm doomed. Yeah. And then last last number is very charming. It's 13 years old. 13 years old was the age of Otto Roweetter's son, Richard, when he allegedly became the first person to slice a loaf of bread with this machine. Wow. That's pretty cool. And then did he like slap two slices of bread on his butt and be like, look, I got a bread butt?

because he's 13. But sandwich. Ha-ha. Yeah. And by 1920s standards, that's the most outrageous thing anyone's ever done. Like, he's jailed immediately. He's jailed. Put into adult jail.

Yeah. Yeah, like, apparently this Rowetter story was mostly forgotten for many decades. And it was mostly just some local lore in Chillic Coffee, Missouri. And according to the New York Times, one person who rediscovered it was a budding local journalist from Chilicothe named Catherine Stortz Ripley. She was going through microfilm records about their town when she learned they might be the origin of sliced bread, which even in the past was like mind-blowing. Right.

And then in order to verify the story, she tried to get in touch with Otto Rowetter. He'd passed, but she reached his son, Richard, who brought her his father's scrapbooks, confirmed the story and said when he was a 13-year-old kid, his dad like finished the prototype and let him try it. Let him try running bread through it. That's very cute. May or may not be completely true, but it's cute and it's a family thing. The Rue Wetter's made this happen.

Yeah, I love that story. It's like how Oppenheimer lit his son, you know, push the button on the atomic bomb. You'll do it and you'll like it. Yeah, he was a maniac. I didn't like that movie either. Anyway. I didn't watch it. I watched it.

It wasn't that good. Oh, okay. It doesn't need to catch strays. I might cut this. Anyway. It's so good to have opinions on movies. It's really fun. That's true.

Why am I afraid? Yeah, and so, like, out of row weather, in many ways, launched sliced bread as a thing, but also I was surprised to learn a few other steps in the creation of sliced bread as a concept on a product, which is our takeaway number one.

People invented white bread and consistent breadloaf shapes long before the invention of sliced bread. The slicer was kind of the third step. Right. Well, it kind of makes sense because before you have the slicer, you do slice the bread, like with your hands. Yeah, with your hands with a knife, yeah. And so, like, having a consistent loaf, it would be easier

and also the regularity of it might be soothing to people. I don't know. to make regular sandwiches so that all your sandwiches are roughly the same dimensions. I could see why people wanted that before the bread slicer. It makes sense, yeah. And I asked myself, like, before researching, how did I think this happened? And I kind of thought all three things were invented together. And in hindsight, it's silly to have not thought about stuff like baguettes being famous white bread before a wonder bread, you know.

Right. But also, I was surprised that consistent bread. breadloaf shaping was a passion of people long before a machine made it into slices for you. Like they wanted super consistent loaves that then people sliced by hand. Well, everyone wanted the Dagwood sandwich where it's like you have a big stack of bread and cheese and olives and various things. And you can't do that if you have like an irregularly shaped bread. Yeah, the comic strip Blondie really captured something about American masculinity. Yeah.

American men think they should have the most beautiful life in the world. and the biggest sandwich in the world, even though they're just like a beady-eyed guy with weird hair, you know? Your wife's waist has to be roughly the circumference of a pencil, whereas your sandwich must be taller than your human child, and then I guess somehow you eat it by unhinging your jaw like a snake. Yeah, it started out as like a slice of life about the woman.

And then it's like, but what if there was a guy? who really like sandwiches. And then like American society at the time was like, yeah, that's actually much more interesting. We want to see more of this sandwich guy. Yeah. It's like poochie. The audience should be thinking about sandwich guy if he's not in the frame. Right.

Yeah. So sliced bread, it was a series of steps and very disconnected from the slicing before we got there. This also gets into some bread history. The key source for this takeaway is an excellent book. It's called Bread, A Global History. It's by food historian William Rubell, and it's from a really cool series of books of a global history of various food items. We're also saying digital resources from serious eats.com and a feature for Smithsonian Magazine by Colin Schultz. We needed to have white bread at a large scale and matching loaves before you could put a white uniform loaf into a slicing machine.

Each step was totally separate. White bread goes back thousands of years in bread history. Also, bread is older than I expected. It took millennia for bread to be a common food. But William Rubel says there's evidence of grinding barley into a flour in the eastern Mediterranean as early as 22,500 years ago. Wow. So people developed many breads that are unleavened or leavened because making flour, you actually don't need advanced technology. Just two rocks, you can smash grains.

It's that simple. Right. The tools are simple. It's just that agriculture is very hard. So that's why bread wasn't that common for a long time. Right. Because collecting enough wild grains for bread seems hard. Yeah, you can just incredibly laboriously make a bread.

And so people said, I don't love labor. And once in a while, I'll make bread. It's basically the origin. Right. And then bread starts to become common for most people around 5,000 years ago. specifically in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. And I'm talking about wheat bread. Like there were other breads of other grains, other places.

And then they figured out the basics of white flour that early. It was just also horrible labor. Because as we send the numbers, you have to separate grain and get just one of the three parts. Right. And then you got to mill it. So that's extremely difficult with your hands and stones. Yeah. And like, like, I don't think millstone.

has a good connotation in terms of ease of use. Yeah, and also William Rubel's book, he has a lot of either old pictures of old statues or pictures of like carved art of people milling grain. And it's just someone bent over one rock with another smooth rock. It's that tough. And later they developed machines or ways for animals to help do the pushing. But it's still rough. Yeah, windmill, water mills, animal mills.

Right. Animal Mill is just like a donkey or a horse attached to a thing walking in circles. Right. Or an ox, you know. So, you know, you can do it, but also it's for rich people. Yeah. And especially white bread is for rich people because you are often just discarding bran and germ. Like, that's food and nutrients. You have to be rich to bother to throw that away. Food for poor. Essentially. And so he also talks about how for especially the past thousand years in Europe, basically, basically, paler bread was for richer people. Yeah, it's wild. It took until the mid-1900s in the United States for white bread to start to be seen for poorer people or less advanced.

And before that, for basically all of history, white bread was fancy. It's still like less expensive now, right, than like whole wheat bread. Yeah. The cheapest bread is just like white bread. It's taken an enormous amount of mechanization and food supply systems for that to be, way it works. Right. And William Rubel also, he reprints a painting from 1630 by a French artist who depicted a rich person's possessions. So there's like a chessboard and a loot and like other fancy things. But then also included there is a beautiful white loaf of bread. Because you could

make that in 1630. It's just difficult and fancy. I love to have my beautiful white bread while I'm looting. Yeah. That's how I know I've made it. And the Colombian exchange helped spread this wheat everywhere. And so from France to Mexico to China, people develop specific breads and pastries using white flour that are special. Right. He also cites a British government survey from 1795. The British government said that Britain's low-class farmers were, quote, losing their wry teeth. Huh.

Which was a way of saying, they're starting to demand wheat. they're not settling for rye and barley and sort of earthy or grains anymore. Got it. Got it. So we, the parliament and the king, need to figure out what to do about that. They're getting too uppity about bread. Yeah, they don't like this rye business anymore. A pumpernickel won't even touch it.

Yeah, and they had just seen French peasants overthrow that monarchy too, so they were probably worrying. Like, 1795 is... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Better give them some bread they like Right, the king's tugging at the most enormous collar Yeah As things industrialized and as milling is easier and easier People start getting picky about which grain the bread's made out of

And also which parts of the grain you're making the flour out of And so that's kind of the origin of white bread being more and more democratized I wonder if that increased the level of constipation We just talked about We just talked about toilet paper in an episode Last week. Yeah. And so it's like I wonder if you could like see like, okay, look at their teeth and see they're eating white bread.

And then we can look at this ancient sponge on a stick and then find out whether they were constipated or not. Potentially. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about also digs on the former Silk Road finding the parasites in people's poop specifically and stuff. Yeah, it's of interest, yeah. But as all that happens, people also say, I also want my loaf to be a totally uniform shape. Right? Like, not just the baker tries to make them kind of similar sizes, but like I want magically rectangular. Or a rectangle or even a rhombus,

but it better be like an actual rhombus. People start to approach that. Decades before Otto Rowe start slicing the bread, he can bother to do that because companies are making uniform pans for baking the bread, you know? So you get a specific loaf shape, but also some of those pans still, they have an open top, so you get the poof on the top, you know. Yeah. I mean, I like that, but we really wanted complete regularity, didn't want any surprises with their bread. Yeah, and like, the most emphatic person about that was an American in the second half of the 1800s. So decades before auto row weather even starts making a machine. A guy named George Pullman comes up with the most uniform bred in history to that point

because George Pullman manufactures railroad cars for passengers. That's so interesting because here, if you want to talk about a bus that you like could potentially hire to like go somewhere, you call it a Pullman. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, he was like globally. famous as the maker of the most popular and luxurious rail cars, which also then he hired the porters for, he tried to control all of the economics of it. And then that influenced buses and other

stuff too, yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's like, sometimes it's just used for bus. Usually it's used for sort of like more of a charter bus type thing, private bus or something, like not a city bus. It's like, oh, a Pullman. Yeah, he, he's not that famous today, but his name was up there with Henry Ford, but for being a tycoon of a vehicle that lots of people sit on benches and rows on, or then an even more luxurious rail car for like just one rich guy, where it has upholstered everything and butlers and porters and stuff. So that, yeah, that must have somehow translated into private buses at some point, at least in Europe.

Yeah, his company diversified, yeah. Wow. So he's now forgotten, but he was also a notorious monster of labor history. is the other way he was famous. He exploited his power to use the U.S. army to crush striking porters in his company. And people got so mad at both Pullman and the government, they, among other things, the U.S. government started the Labor Day holiday to try to say like, no, we don't hate workers. Right, right. Yeah.

You know. We certainly didn't have a bunch of incidences where striking workers. were just killed. And Pullman was like, I do kind of hate workers, though. Right. And so among other things, he was cheap. And so he tried to make a bread as uniform and low waste as possible to pinch every penny. And so he helped create what became called the Pullman loaf.

And Series Eats has a recipe for it and everything. The key thing to make a Pullman loaf was something else called a Pullman pan, which is a bread pan that also has a lid. The Pullman Lid. And instead of having flared size, it has a totally vertical sides. Right. And so you end up with a completely rectangular and with completely squared off corners, like perfectly geometric loaf of bread. This is very much like a, I don't know, like a villain in a young adult story kind of thing where it's like the bread must be at 90 degree angles.

And no, you can't dye your hair green. That's wrong, and you'll go to bread jail. It's the footloose town. Kevin Bacon is dancing through a warehouse making breads of all shapes. Anything. I can see him like doing a pirouet with like a baguette. Yeah, he makes a dance partner out of breads. It's actually kind of creepy.

I've made a bread woman and I love her. And it's like, well, maybe the mean guy in town was right. I don't know. Snacking on her face. And yeah, allegedly part of the reason he did this was also the loaves take less storage base on the train car. Right. It's almost like airline food today or something. It needs to be perfectly space using.

Stackable. But the upshot is Pullman and others develop a completely uniform breadloaf shape. And because bread can be white, especially with modern milling, and also bread can be a uniform shape, those are the two inventions that's at the stage for slicing bread. Yeah. That also means that the Wonder Bread brands did not initially start as offering sliced bread. Oh, interesting. It started as uniform white loaves. And you had to do the slicing yourself.

Yeah, for about a decade, if you bought Wonder Bread, this initial version of Wonder Bread, you were still slicing it yourself. I had no idea. And was the wonder about it just that it was like, hey, this is good bread, man. Yeah, it was like the taste and also that the loaf is bigger. I see. Wonder Bread started out as a brand of the Taggart baking company in 1921. So before Otto Raubetter finished his machines. In 1921, he was doing day jobs because his warehouse had burned down.

He was furiously trying to work on his machines. Yeah. And Taggart offered wonder bread. It was one and a half pounds instead of the usual one pound. So the size and taste and texture was what was wondrous about it. It wasn't sliced yet. Right. The sliced bread as a concept, the slicing was the final idea and came later.

It's so weird. Well, I mean, everything had to all had to cosmically align for this bread to come into existence, which does make me feel like the universe does trend towards bread. It curves toward justice like a croissant. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yum. How about a sliced croissant? That's not as good. There's so many good kinds of bread, too.

That's part of why I wanted sliced bread to be the sift topic. We think like, oh, whatever. It's amazing. And our next takeaway is arguably the greatest achievement of sliced bread, and I'd never heard of it. Because takeaway number two, in the mid-1900s U.S., Wonderbread solved two public health crises, single-handedly. Single-brededly. Yeah. Yeah, I had no idea, but after a few years in World War II, the U.S. government sent scientists to help Wonderbride.

get necessary nutrients into the product to lift millions of Americans out of two basically nutritional deficiency diseases. Oh, wow. Okay. Like if folks have heard the salt episode, we talk about iodizing salt. Also, if folks have heard of putting fluoride in water, it's like this kind of thing. But Wonderbread specifically did that. Yeah.

Put an iron in cereal, things like that. Yeah. Yeah, they, among other nutrients put vitamins B1 and B3 into Wonderbread. and improved hundreds of thousands of people's lives. Wow. It's amazing. So is this like a collaboration between Wonderbred and the government? Yeah, specifically.

Okay. Yeah. U.S. government food scientists. And they did it because Wonder Bread was such a massive hit products. Right. Everyone was already buying it. It was arguably the most popular solid food brand of any type in America. Right.

Key sources here are a feature for mash.com by Lauren Corona and a feature for Jason. or daily by Allison Miller. Again, Otto Roweeder and his partner start selling pre-slice bread loaves. Within five years, sliced bread is nationally popular, and they make a fortune selling machines to slice it. And so the makers of Wonder Bread, that brand really takes off because it's one of the first brands to be pre-sliceed bread in stores nationwide. Okay, so they're like early adopters of this slicing technology. And it's also, you know, fluffy. and apparently tastes very good.

I'm not a fan of it. I think I've maybe had it. I had Wonder Bread once with like the Jif peanut butter on it. And I guess I'm just not American enough because I didn't like any of that business. Yeah, we're basically too young. We're from like the generations after people were stoked about Wonder Bread. Right. Yeah.

When health food started to be like, no, you want some brown in your bread. Yeah, and like before that Wonder Bread was accurately sold as a healthy food. Yeah. But then also by the 1970s, it was being sold basically inaccurately as a healthier food than other breads. But basically because other bread companies also did the fortification and nutrient addition on top of maybe keeping the whole grains. Right, right. And so that eliminated Wonder Bread's distinctiveness as a healthy food. Was it, it was something where these like foods,

scientists were like, hey, all these people have these terrible vitamin B deficiencies, we just got to slip it in the bread. Exactly. Yeah, it's the same logic as so many people eat salts if we put iodine in it that will make them healthier. And how did they kind of like get Wonderbred to comply with this? Just like, they like pay them directly or just be like, hey, you'll make more money if you're like, this is fortified and will help you? Great question. It's apparently free scientific help. and you can sell your bread this way. Okay, okay. You can promote it as having, initially they said it had eight nutrients that are special, then 12 nutrients.

They did ads on hit shows like Howdy Do Do Doe to tell people, Wonder Bread is healthier, and it will make you stronger and everything. Howdy Doody? Was that the little puppet cowboy guy? Yeah. This episode is like so mid-century United States now. Very much so. We've moved past the history from before. In the 1930s, Wonder Bread had been acquired by Continental Bacon Company to sell it nationally. They sold it so effectively it was the biggest bread in America.

And then during World War II, the government said, hey, there are nationwide crises of two diseases. And these are still diseases that exist because they're purely nutritional deficiency stuff. Like there's not a germ to eliminate or something. Pallagra is one disease. It's called by a lack of niacin, also known as vitamin Dio. B3. And apparently that disease afflicted a quarter million Americans as of World War II. And it causes dizziness, causes diarrhea can be fatal just from not having enough B3. Was this just due to rationing at the time where there's not enough variety of food?

It's like it's kind of all the reasons. It's rationing, people not knowing they need it, people not eating a healthy enough diet, people being too poor to get the foods that have it. It's all the above. Yeah. And it was the same reasons for another disease called Barry Berry, which again, it exists in the world just in places where people lack what they need. That's a really fun-sounding disease. I'm sure it's not an actual fun disease, but like I've got Barry Barry and that's really hard to take seriously. The matching syllables, yeah. It's just like it sounds upbeat. And as you said, it is, of course, horrible. It's caused by a lack of thiamine, which is known as vitamin. B1. Muscle weakness, heart problems, if untreated for long enough, brain damage and heart failure. These are both horrible diseases.

Why do they call it Barry Berry? Way too cute. Yeah. They're both B vitamin deficiencies. Again, Pallagra vitamin B3, Barry Barry, Vitamin B1. Wonder Bread put those and other nutrients into the bread, which also just made the bread healthier overall because, again, it's white bread. They were removing parts of the grain that provide some of the stuff.

So it was good to put that in all around. And then consumers noticed that, hey, both of these diseases have like disappeared in the United States. They were basically eradicated. It's absolutely wonderful. And then also consumers noticed Wonder Bread tasted and had a texture that they liked a little less. And so then government scientists continued helping Continental baking to try to improve the bread's taste and texture while retaining the vitamins. Right, right. You know, it is the government supporting a private company, but also it's a huge public health win.

So great, worth it. So it's like they got these food scientists just having a lot of sandwiches, being like, you know, this peanut butter and white bread sandwich is a little better than the other one. I guess that's fun food tasting, huh? I like bread. Great. Yeah. And yeah, this was basically the downfall of wonder bread as a brand eventually. because again, other bread companies also imitated this amazing public health win.

And then also Wonder Bread continued to have some more sodium and some more sugar than some other brands. I see. And so again, nutrition is just tradeoffs. You can have sodium and sugar. But by the 1970s, Wonder Bread was still doing the same previously true public health claims that their bread's healthier. And then regulators like the U.S.'s FTC had to force them to stop. because this was just no longer true. It was about as healthy and fortified as other bread or less healthy.

Was a whole wheat bread starting to come on the scene at this point too? Yeah, okay. Either through fortification or retaining more of the grain also has the vitamins. Yeah. And Wonderbred could no longer say, for example, that it makes your brain develop more effectively. Right, right. That was true at one point, maybe, but now no. Sorry. Yeah.

And whole wheat bread still has like sugar and salt in it. It's not like they don't have the bad stuff or quote unquote bad. You need some sugar and salt. But it's just that it additionally has more of the good stuff in it because of the inclusion of more. It's not that it's like way, way, way, way healthier. That's right. And it also all varies by brand and varies by countries. So we don't have tips for you on what bread to eat.

Like what brand or whatever. Don't ask. Yeah. We're not sandwich professors on this show. PhD, professional. Professional hoagie. Hogi. Thank you.

Professional hoagie degree. So, yeah. So like when I was a kid, Wonderbred had kind of a negative reputation health-wise. And I had no idea. In the 1940s and 50s, it saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Incredible. And is one of the greatest public health wins in American history. Yeah.

It's so cool. Also, the packaging is fun. I love those little dots on there that they got going on. It's nice. Yeah, that's part of how it was the top bread for government scientists to take this interest. Is they just also sold it effectively before that, yeah. Yeah, branding. Yeah.

It looks great. Yeah. Wonder is a nice name. Yeah, it is. I like my bread to be wonderful. And yeah, folks, that's two big takeaways, tons of numbers. We're going to take a short break. and then slice a few more quick loaves into takeaways, you know, after the break.

None of that metaphor made sense, but I'm on break now, so you can't bother me about it. This is like a sandwich where we sandwich episode around the ads. And we usually don't have ads, too. So skinny sandwich. We're back with two more quick takeaways for you, folks. Let's get into takeaway number three. World War II sparked a brief ban on American sliced bread and a push to stop wasting bread heels worldwide.

People are wasting the heels? You make cinnamon toast out of those little suckers, guys. That's the thing. The advent of sliced bread dovetailed with a long-running practice of people not always making use of the ends of their bread loaves. Apparently the Oxford English Dictionary describes the concept of the heel. of a loaf going back to the 1300s AD. People have always said the heel, there's not that much of the, you know, hearty middle

of the bread. There's just kind of a tough crust. Maybe I get around to making it into croutons or cinnamon toast or other stuff, but otherwise I might get a little lazy, feed it to animals or toss it. Oh, yeah. My dog would definitely appreciate that. She's a big, she would eat a lot of bread if I wasn't using my reasoning to realize that's not good for her health.

stupid reasoning. And also as slice bread came along, like the heels are so consistent, you know, and also people love the consistency of the whole rest of the loaf, which is different. And so especially after World War II, people started saying, we got to stop wasting these heels, even though you can fold them into hot dog bun type things and make them in all sorts of parts of recipes like bread pudding and, you know. But yeah, bread heels are great for cinnamon toast or even french toast. You can really get a lot out of a heel.

Yeah, and with both of these things, it was all resource optimization stuff. Each story is a little separate because it's different events. But the first one is that the U.S. briefly banned pre-slice bread in World War II because of a concern about using too much paper and wax to package it. Oh, I see, interesting. But how does that use more paper and wax than just loaf bread? when you slice up the loaf, there's more basically gaps for staleness or germs to get into it. And so manufacturers would put more wax paper or more plastic wrap or other just material around it.

And especially Otto Roweeder and Frank Bench, that was their first move to make the bread last longer before they figured out preservatives and stuff as an additional thing. I see. Okay. So pre-preservatives, we were just sort of like doing more packaging. And also before the year of sliced bread, also bakeries were saying, oh, I can manufacture more bread industrially and ship it farther if I just wrap it more. That's another thing I should do. So also like wrapped bread was a big product before sliced bread. It's kind of fun. Wrapped in just like wax paper? Yeah, just like paper, wax paper, plastic, anything. And yeah, and then in January, 1943, one U.S. government of

decided maybe we can get a win here of saving more resources. So Claude R. Wickard. Claude R. Wickard was U.S. Food Administrator, which was just like putting controls on food production to try to ration or save or more optimally use food. And in mid-January, 1993, he banned pre-slicing bread. He said, we're using too much paper and too much paraffin wax to keep pre-sliced bread fresh. So everybody needs to buy an intact loaf.

and cut it at home. So we use less packaging, and that can go toward the troops. Government making me cut my own bread just because we're in World War II. That was apparently everyone's reaction. Yeah. Major media like the New York Times got interview quotes and also received letters from all over the country, from people saying, I don't want to slice the bread or my kids won't eat it because they're used to pre-slice. And that's all amazing given sliced bread had only been a big product for about 15 years.

It was pretty new still. I don't know. That's pretty embarrassing because usually when we're talking about World War II, we talk about like, look at the fortitude and the sacrifices that people are making. And it's like, I don't want to slice bread. It does make me feel more upbeat about my generation because we've done some cool things and some not cool things. And so did they, you know? There were whiners every generation.

Like anyone who's like, oh, this is a whiny generation. It's like your generation whined about everything, too. And this was an actual ban for a real amount of time, but it was only about six or seven weeks. Okay. By early March, 1993, the government reversed the ban. And Wickard claimed it was not because of public outcry. He claimed it was because he was being smart. He said that, quote, the savings are not as much as we had expected.

end quote. Okay. The marginal amount of wax and paper, I guess it didn't affect the troops so much. And he also said that they had learned U.S. bread companies, you know, they buy their wax paper and stuff ahead of time. And he learned the bread companies already had enough packaging for four months worth of products. So they were just keeping it under lock and key because the product had been banned and why not just use it. Right, right. Yeah, okay.

Well, at least he admitted he was wrong. And then all these angry Americans did not revolt. Yeah, people were like, I'll, I guess, do other heroic things. But this one, no. No. It's a bridge too far. I want a machine to cut my bread to 12.5 millimeters or 0.49 inches. Thank you.

And then the other thing is in the immediate aftermath of World War II, U.S. President Harry Truman helped spark a. new focus on saving and using bread heels and not throwing them away. Okay. Sure. Also, apparently there's all kinds of lingo for heels. Some people call them bread ends. There are other names.

But, you know. Bread butts. The crusty end bits. Yeah, bread butts, sure. It feels like the butt. It does feel like the butt. But I mean, why was there this? Because obviously it's good not to waste food, but usually a president doesn't like say,

like, you got to eat the whole apple, including the core, because we're. we're not wasting food now folks. So like what was his what was the impetus for scolding people about the bread heels? Yeah, great question. It's basically a combination of sliced bread convenience making especially Americans feel like everything should be convenient all the time no matter what. And also most of the rest of the world having been blown up in some way by World War II. Oh, well. Like the bombs didn't really hit here other than parts of Hawaii.

And so. Yeah. Truman put out a call for apparently 38 different forms of waste to be eliminated. And on his list, number 17 was develop methods for saving and use of bread ends, many of which are wasted at present time. Because the pre-sliced form of bread made Americans think it will always be one shape I expect. And these two heels are less tasty to me than the whole rest of the thing. So I might get around to using it cleverly, but if I'm rich enough or casual enough, I won't check it, whatever.

I mean, I think people probably still do that today. I think there's a lot of... Yeah, I've done that occasionally. Yeah, there's a lot of food waste. Was it just like a philosophical thing for him, or was there like some kind of economic issue with there being food waste? It was mostly philosophical for him and for the United States. Other countries, it was something that got more focus.

Because also American sliced bread spread as our troops, and GIs were various places. And so apparently we helped spark a unique bread heel use culture in Japan. Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Because especially after World War II, everything from our fashion to baseball spreads in Japan. And as small scale Japanese bakers start making more and more of the pre-slice bread,

they figure out logistics to either give customers a heel-free experience or sell them a bag of heels. They just started taking the heels out of bread loaves and also sometimes removing the crusts completely. There's also like special softer and less sweet breads that people call milk bread in Japan. But they started offering their customers, hey, here's a loaf of just slices. And then also I have a few sacks of just the heels.

We'll link TDM.com's picture of just what that looks like. It's basically the plastic wrapping for a loaf of sliced bread but full of heels all stacked up from a bunch of loaves. It's what you think it would be. It's a sack of heels. Yeah. And Japan focused so much on celebrating bread heels. They even came up with a cute name for them.

They're called Pan No Mimi, which means bread ears, translated literally. I love it. It's great. It's the ears. Not the butt. That is cute. And off that, we have one final takeaway about sliced bread culture. Because takeaway number four, the concept and idiom of the concept and idiom of

something being the best thing since sliced bread was probably inspired by ads saying sliced bread was the best thing since wrapped bread. We could have endlessly iterated this where like sliced bread is the best thing since wrapped bread and then something else is the best thing since sliced bread. But we just stopped agreeing on the best thing. So it's just continued to be sliced bread forever. Well, also because have we updated bread technology? I mean, there's canned bread.

Nobody likes that. Oh, yeah. So what's like, yeah, it's disgusting. So like what's like there is no new bread technology that I can think of. Yeah, not particularly. Yeah. Right? It's not like there's no like pre-buttered bread or, you know.

It really started with the guys from the beginning of the sliced bread story, Otto Roweeder and Frank Bench. Key sources are a piece for KCUR Public Radio, Kansas City by reporter Suzanne Hogan and a feature for Time magazine by writer Jennifer Lassie. They say that when Rowetter and Bench started advertising their pre-slice loaves, which they did a lot of ads for in all the local papers. They used this phrase to describe the first sliced bread, quote, the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped. Wow. It was specifically promoted with the logic of best things since sliced bread. That was how they sold sliced bread. But from a previous innovation of guys wrapping it in paper and wax and plastic.

I guess now it could be like and then like wrapping bread is the best thing since sliced bread. And then it's like, my name is bread and I'm here to say you should eat me every day. I'm J.B. Full of B vitamins. That's my rap name. Yeah. That's bread. I'm white as Wonderbread, if you couldn't tell.

Same here. Apparently further sellers of sliced bread saw that pitchwork and did not necessarily exactly the same phrasing, but the Wonderbread brand, they used this concept that sliced bread is the greatest new technology. It was specifically sold that way in real life. That's not an idiom we made up later. Yeah, it's not a metaphor. It's not a joke. It's just like sliced bread is the best thing we've ever made. Yeah, and treating wrapped bread as the previous step.

Like wrapped bread used to be the greatest thing since a previous thing, I guess, you know? Yeah, okay. There's all these, this title of greatest new technology steps. We loved our bread. And then it spread from there. There's like two theories about how either it was just a grassroots idea, everybody kept repeating, or a specific comedian. promoted the idea in a joke about his move to television.

Is a comedian named Red Skelton. Oh, yeah. Who is like a name? My grandparents have a best of on DVD. That's how I'd heard of him. Red Skelton was one of the most famous people in America for a lot of the 1900s. He's born in Vincennes, Indiana in 1913. And the Indiana Historical Society says he became a huge star in vaudeville and radio and movies all in a row.

He's got a lot of boyish charm for someone who sounds like a skeletor rival. Yeah, red skeleton sounds like a burning corpse of some kind. Yeah. He also, he reminds me weirdly of like a less erratic Benny Hill, his comedy. We talked about Benny Hill a few weeks ago. And also the other comedian he reminds me of it, it's like one step before Carol Burnett in the evolution of comedy. It's a lot of big sketches, a lot of recurring characters, that kind of thing.

Yeah. It is very funny for you to say, I know what you mean because Benny Hill's comedy is very like sort of sex joke based. But when you say a less erotic Benny Hill, I'm like, the image of Benny Hill in my mind is never exactly erotic. Yeah, it's sort of a round-faced small man. Yeah, he's boyish, impish. But one of them was doing body jokes and Red Skelton was doing more like weird sketch comedy characters. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And he was this hugely massive star, especially on the radio.

But also he was in more than 30 major motion pictures for MGM. Networks like NBC and CBS that started as radio then tried to recruit Skelton to make a television show when they got into TV. And this could be apocryphal. I couldn't find like clips of it or verification of it. But allegedly, before the launch of the Red Skelton show in 1951, which went on to be a smash hit for 20 years, before that, allegedly Skelton was doing press, and people asked him either, will you transition to TV successfully or is TV any good as a medium? Isn't like audio better, I guess? But allegedly Skelton joked that TV was the greatest thing since slice bread. And so potentially that took this known phrase and known idea. and took it national and made it super famous. Yeah.

So either he or just the whole culture promoted it. Yeah. Bangor joke. I mean, like, by the looks of it, a lot of his jokes is just him crossing his eyes. So, you know. Yeah, a lot of his headshots are in what looks to me like clown makeup. Right. And the clips I've seen, it's like minus bodiness a lot like Benny Hill.

A lot of running around falling down. He also did catch phrases. You know, it's fun. It's comedy. I mean, I think it's kind of like a hobo. costume perhaps clown kind of thing yeah because he's got like a he's got a painted on five o'clock shadow and then white lips it does very much evoke the vaudeville era and the things done during that time which we're not always racially sensitive yeah like like one of his characters was apparently

clem cadittlehopper clem cadetlehopper was a slow-witted pumpkin you know So like you would tune in and you would hope he's going to do Clem, sort of like you'd tune into 1990s and 80s, S&L and hope they do Wayne's World, you know? Is that kind of thing? Right. Yeah. So like sketch comedy or general culture spread this idea, but it all is rooted in sliced bread promoting itself as the new best thing since a previous thing.

That's how that trope originated is people were truly like, this is cool tech. It's the best thing since, you know, bread was a little more convenient, which I think everyone seems to absolutely love. Especially Americans. We're like, great. I'm going to drive to the store and get some. Cool. And I do.

I often find myself being like, can you believe the store had acts about just all sorts of things? I think when there's something new in the store, especially if you lived in the same place and used the same store a long time, it's like pretty rad. It's pretty good. No, I mean, I get that. Like whenever I find, especially like certain ingredients that are a little hard to find here whenever I find something like, did you know. you know that I found fried onions at the specialty Japanese store? Yeah, that kind of thing. It makes your whole day.

It's great. So, grocery is. Groceries are important because we got to eat. And bread's part of that whole equation. And for a while was like the main part. It was like, if we don't have bread, we cannot eat. Yeah. I once tried to slice some loaf of,

bakery bread when I was like I think it was chabata just to be really specific and I was a teenager and I was um my brain wasn't fully developed so I held it in my hand as I was slicing and uh and then I was like oh this is huh this is very painful and it was because you know like I was used saw it to my hand at a certain point so what I'm gonna what I what I mean is that sliced bread might save lives beyond just the fortifying them with vitamins for teenagers such as myself who, you know, would kind of like forget the purpose of a cutting board. No joke. I wanted solid information about knife accidents for this and I couldn't find it really.

Right. So I wish I could have. Antiquot. Yeah. But it's a thing, for sure. Like, come on. Yeah. Be careful out there, folks.

Yeah, don't, yeah. Use a cutting. board or buy it pre-slice is my thing because, you know, it does in fact turn out that there's a reason we don't hold the bread while we slice it. And I learned that when I was like 15 years old, which seems like it might be too old. But, you know, I'm a lifelong learner. Every, every epoch brings new lessons about bread and knives. Oh, lifelong learning. What a wonderful ending message.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, people invented white bread and invented consistent breadloaf shapes long before they invented pre-sliced bread. Takeaway number two, in the mid-1900s United States, Wonderbread, single-brededly cured palagra and cured berry-berryberry. across the country. Takeaway number three, World War II sparked a brief ban on American sliced bread

and sparked a push to stop wasting bread heels worldwide, especially in Japan. Takeaway number four, the concept of something being the best thing since sliced bread originated with ads claiming sliced bread was the best thing since wrapped bread. And then a ton of numbers beforehand during those takeaways, especially about the fundamental parts of a grain of wheat, which is where most terms about kinds of bread products come from. Also, the story of Otto Rowetter, inventing sliced bread, and also standing on the shoulders of giants, and also making it a product all over the world super rapidly. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. if you support this show at maximum fun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the real story of people restoring the Sistine Chapel with pieces of bread, and a confusing claim that somehow wonder bread

was the specific material. Visit sifpod.f.ffffun for that bonus show. for a library of more than 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows, including our recent latest episode of The Inspectors Inspectors. It is special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun. dot org. Key sources this week include a wonderful book called Bread, A Global History, that is by Foodwriter and Foodways historian William Rubel. Also leaned on the work of Zachary Crockett, who is an economics writer and communicator for the team at Freakonomics, and the website Priceonomics, a lot of digital resources from the Smithsonian, as well as the NC Cooperative Extension, which is a collaboration between North Carolina State University and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. On top of that, tons of helpful journalism and researched features on the internet, such as a piece by writer Ernie Smith for TDM.com, a report for K-CUR Public Radio, Kansas City, by

Suzanne Hogan, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land-lawn.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people, and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. That first prototyping of sliced bread was done on the traditional land of the Osage, Fox, Occhetti, Chacoin, and Kickapoo peoples. And in my location, Chilicothe, Missouri's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's

description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly, incredibly fascinating, by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 74. That's about the topic of Mur. You can also hear the bonus show for that Murr episode, if you remember. That bonus show is about a clothing store that specifically caters to popes and also sells the socks for Catholic clergy to the public. I bought a pair of bishop socks after making that. So I recommend that episode.

I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping. support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists' own shows

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