Think of the best thing ever. Is it sliced bread?
Since it was first sold in 1928, sliced bread has been the veritable gold
standard to which every other great thing has been compared. Sliced bread is
pretty cool but the coolest?
It seems odd, not to mention uniquely American, to so strongly champion
something thats actually just an old thing with a little change. And yet its
done all the time: new models of cars, each generation of the iPod, the 50 state
quarters, the Super Bowl. The list goes on. It should come as no surprise, then,
that a loaf of bread would cause a major uproar when pre-cut into homogenous
pieces.
Its been nearly a century since Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the machine
that shaves 15 seconds off the preparation of toast, but Id bet that since he,
and every other baker ever, started offering pre-sliced bread, the quality of
the bread has gone down. Most sliced breads are roughly the same: a poor excuse
for a crust thats little more than a thin, brownish, bad-tasting strip around
the outside, and a doughy expanse of white between said brown borders.
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