Before July fades, let’s not forget an important culinary anniversary that should have been celebrated all over Missouri this month but wasn’t. Well, not in Kansas City anyway.
On July 7, 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, made history by selling the first loaf of sliced bread. The inventor of the first bread-slicing machine, a former ophthalmologist and jewelry-store owner named Otto Frederick Rohwedder (weirdly, he was born on the same date, July 7, 1880, in Des Moines, Iowa) was right there at the baking company to see the first loaf of Kleen Maid Sliced Bread go through his invention’s patented cutting bands to be automatically wrapped in wax paper for sale. Two years later, Wonder Bread made presliced bread the best thing to happen since … whatever.
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time before companies such as Kansas City-based Interstate Bakeries mass-produced sliced white Wonder Bread (which was actually introduced unsliced in 1921 by the Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis, which was sold to Continental Bakeries in 1925, which was snapped up by Interstate Bakeries in 1995). Consumers either baked their own bread or bought a whole loaf at the local bakery.
Bakers howled at the idea of sliced bread: It would get dry and stale too quickly, they argued. But it was immediately popular because the neat, uniform slices made perfect sandwiches and could easily be toasted in those shiny, newfangled pop-up toasters that Charles Strite invented in 1919.
Rohwedder’s great success came at a high price, though. He first thought of inventing a bread-slicing machine while living in St. Joseph in 1912, but he didn’t create his prototype until 1917. The first machine was destroyed in a fire. By the time he perfected his invention, in the late 1920s, his fledgling company was hit by the Depression, and Rohwedder was forced to sell his patents to a bigger operation, which hired him as a manager and salesman.
This year, the town of Chillicothe erected not one but two commemorative plaques at different locations, staking its claim as the official home of sliced bread. For many years, the city of Battle Creek, Michigan, has insisted that it deserved the honor, and several Internet sites still make that claim. But Battle Creek has never come up with the documentation to back up its boast and, apparently, has dropped the assertion that it sold the first loaf of sliced bread before Chillicothe did.
That first bread-slicing machine no longer exists. Catherine Ripley, news editor of the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, tells me there are two theories as to what happened to that original Rohwedder machine. “One story has it being used until it fell apart,” she says. “The other story has it tossed on the junk pile in 1960 when a new owner bought the old bakery building.”
Nonetheless, Chillicothe has big plans for its little slice of culinary history. There’s already a huge mural painted on a downtown wall proclaiming it the home of sliced bread, and the city has established a Sliced Bread Committee that has all kinds of ideas to promote Chillicothe as a tourist location. Among those ideas is something on a grand scale, like creating “The World’s Largest Loaf of Sliced Bread.”
An even more appealing relic from the past would be for the powers-that-be in Chillicothe to persuade the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to loan the city the second Rohwedder's bread-slicing-and-wrapping machine, which is stored in a museum warehouse. “That’s a long process,” Ripley says. “We’re also thinking of creating a replica of the original machine that the city would actually own.”
Just make sure it’s big enough to slice the world’s largest loaf. – Charles Ferruzza
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