Sliced Bread: Should it Really be the Gold Standard for ‘The Best Thing Since…’ ?
The expression ‘The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread’ seems to be on everyone's lips in the UK media nowadays, and has even been adopted as the title of a documentary radio series on Radio 4. Whenever I hear it used to describe yet another ‘wonder-product’, I have to ask myself where on earth it came from…. As it stands, the phrase implies that the process of slicing bread during its manufacture really does represent an improvement over ‘prior art’ (presumably this would have been un -sliced bread). The nearest I’ve come to an explanation for this somewhat inexplicable enthusiasm in the past for sliced bread as a ‘new and revolutionary' product is that housewives* in the 1950s were so fed up with having to slice their loaves themselves that they couldn’t wait for someone else to do it for them. To my mind, slicing bread as part of its manufacturing process has some notable disadvantages – let’s take a look at a few of them: 1) 1) The slicing ...