The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread!

On January 18, 1943 Washington announced that from that point forward there would be a ban on all pre-sliced bread. In other words, sliced bread was on the chopping block (I know, that was a horrible joke) in favor of freedom and the war effort. To better understand why, you have to understand that during World War II many goods and products were being rationed. Nearly everything was being sacrificed across the nation in an effort to win the war. The United States government figured it needed metal for airplanes more than it did for the machines to slice bread. So for three months (the ban was lifted in March of 1943) everyone had to go back to slicing their bread on their own.

Sliced bread, or better stated the bread slicing machine, was patented in 1928. A man by the name of Otto Frederick Rohwedder in Chillicothe, Missouri started slicing bread then and the rest is history. There's been very little invented since that has been greater than sliced bread, so they say.

Today bread is sliced every which way. Washington sees no reason to ban the slicing of bread anymore. We have an over abundance of nearly everything we could possibly desire. Everything is sliced and diced whenever and however we want it. It would seem we don't have a care in the world.

Maybe that's part of our problem these days. We're complaining that the economy is about to be in a recession, the housing market is brutal (to put it in the most arcane of ways), and we're all in debt. Many are looking at the president and wanting to know what sort of stimulus package he has to bail them out of the consequences of their poor spending habits.

Yet I have to wonder, what if we started rationing a few things in our life? Sliced bread is pretty cheap these days, but if we can't make our mortgage payment why not cut back on the X-Box 360 games? I realize our president encouraged all of us to go to the mall and spend lot's of money shortly after 9/11, but maybe that wasn't the best approach. Instead of instant gratification, why shouldn't we work on saving some money? I am somewhat concerned with people's attitudes these days. If many are not careful, there's going to be quite a few of us thinking our grandparents weren't so crazy for stuffing money in the mattresses. I'd even wager quite a few of them even sliced their own bread back then.

We could all stand to look at our lifestyles and make the decision to slice our own bread for a while.