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Sliced Bread
The irony in the expression, “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” is that bread devolved into something less than bread after we started slicing it.
In most American supermarkets, sliced bread has neither flavor nor texture; it is little more than a fluffy, chewable four-inch square vitamin pill. Bread lost its greatness with the rise of the supermarket in the post-war expansion of the 1950s that made food into pasteurized, homogenized, flavor-enhanced, vitamin-enriched, chemically preserved (and potentially carcinogenic), and highly processed foodstuffs. One goal of food processing is to restore the very things — namely flavor — that the processing itself removed.
Our scientifically-supported neurotic obsession with sterility in the 1950s resulted from a meeting of a war-stimulated technology boom with fear in the face of a polio epidemic. We invented the supermarket for hysterically clean shopping; steaks appeared to be produced in a factory right next door to the Lysol and Clorox plants. Ironically, by boiling every dropped pacifier and by eating processed food, we inhibited the natural immunizations we otherwise would have acquired. Our neurotic caution actually worsened the epidemic. (It seems worth noting that a popular high school chemistry text in this era was Better Living through…
