Today in History—January 18: The Latest Sacrifice in the War Effort: Sliced Bread

On this day in 1943, with hundreds of thousands of troops overseas fighting Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, Americans were already deep in the daily restrictions of wartime life. Sugar and gasoline were in short supply. Tires and coffee were scarce. Ration books and their stamps were part of life—and most people had learned to live with it.

But then the government came for their bread.

The order came from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard, who declared the sale of sliced bread illegal in Food Distribution Order No. 1.

Rationing had begun in 1942 and now governed everything from food to fuel. Each person was assigned a careful tally of stamps, and those stamps had to be handed over—along with cash—to purchase goods. The idea was simple: The war would get what it needed first, and civilians would learn to live with what was left.

By and large, Americans took this seriously, even cheerfully. They planted victory gardens. They ate more Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. They volunteered to distribute ration books. They patched, saved, reused, and made do. (They also sold tires on the lucrative black market that developed.)

But those same Americans had just gotten used to the soft, uniform, preservative-laden glory of machine-sliced bread, and they were reluctant to have it pried from their hands (hands that were not used to holding serrated knives). Wonder Bread had landed on store shelves in 1930, after the first commercial bread-slicing machine debuted at a Missouri bakery in 1928. Americans ate it up. Literally.

Wickard’s rationale wasn’t absurd. Getting bread from wheat in the field to perfectly portioned loaves in consumers’ hands required many of the same things that the war effort needed: waxed paper for packaging, steel for slicing machines, milk for baking, and labor.

The problem was that most bakeries—small shops and commercial factories—already owned slicing machines. Making consumers slice their own bread didn’t save much money, material, or man power. Bakeries found that unsliced loaves didn’t fit in the packaging they had, and consumers were terrible at cutting bread at home, with widespread complaints of waste.

The backlash was intense. After a week the mayor of New York announced that bakeries already equipped with slicing machines could continue to use them, creating instant acrimony between the sliced and the unsliced, the haves and the have-nots.

By early March the order had unraveled. The government backed down, issuing a statement that the country had a four-month store of wax paper—and that was plenty. Sliced bread returned, and the republic endured.