Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So this is an official bonafide short stuff.
That's right. Big thanks to historyofbread.com, history.com, our old friends at howstuffworks.com, and the surprisingly instructive goldmedalbakery.com.
I also want to shout out Mental Floss and Zachary Crockett on Priceonomics.
Great, because this is about sliced bread. You've heard the term, of course, the best thing since sliced bread. And oddly enough, well, not oddly, but sliced bread has been around less than 100 years, even though bread has been around for tens of thousands of years.
Yeah, I think in either a bread episode or a beer episode, we explored whether or not bread was created to make beer portable or a beer starter portable. But regardless, it's been around for a very, very long time. And yet, would you say 30,000 years? Yeah.
I said tens of thousands, but yeah, that's a little more specific.
Okay. Let's say bread was invented 30,000 years ago. It took 29,900 years before this point for somebody to think of pre-sliced bread, or if they thought of it, to actually follow through with that idea. And we have a hero, a hero named Otto Frederick Roeder to thank for that. We'll meet him in a minute.
Yeah. So, I mean, you can listen to our bread episode. We don't need to go over all that. But suffice it to say, for 29,900 years-ish, people were generally tearing off chunks of bread. That's where we get the term breaking bread. There were sandwiches. I believe the first, like – Credit for the real sandwich goes to Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who put lamb and bitter herbs in between two pieces of matzo, the Hillel sandwich. And then in 1840, a woman, Miss Leslie, Eliza Leslie, published Directions for Cookery, in which she talked about what's thought to be the first ham sandwich. where she talks about cutting slices of bread very neatly. So people were slicing their bread at home. It's not like they were like, I want to make a sandwich, but I just tear it off in these big chunks and I don't understand. People were home slicing bread to make sandwiches. But that all changed on July 7th, 1928, right?
Yeah, because that guy I mentioned before, Otto Frederick Rowetter, the father of sliced bread, he had been tinkering with this for well over a decade, right? Rowetter! He was a... It's got to be German. It has to be. Well, his name's Otto Frederick first. I mean, those are your first two clues. And then they really kind of drive it home on the third name. Then Auf Deutsch. He, no, he was. You're not going to do it? What, the Rohwetter? I just want you to say it German. Otto Friedrich Rohwetter.
Yeah, there you go.
I didn't even know I could roll my R's.
You're calling him Rohwetter.
Well, I'm, you know, from Georgia and Ohio and Florida. All right. All right. So anyway, O-T, O-F-R. I don't know. It's his initials. I'm trying to think of something else to call him that you won't make fun of me for. How about Otto? So Otto, he was an inventor and I don't I didn't see anywhere where he got the idea to do this, but just suddenly sat up one day. He's like sliced bread.
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