"The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread"

Really, what is so great about sliced bread anyways?

Every time I hear this common phrase, I think to myself--wait a minute, isn't sliced bread representative of everything that is wrong with out society at the moment? Okay, maybe not wrong, but at least controversial?

The industrialization, the corporate reliance, and the culture of convenience… this is exactly the thing that we are questioning. It’s is all well and good, and makes our lives that much “easier;” on the other hand, it’s not sustainable—meaning that it can’t last, at least not the way we have it now, and in the system we have now.

Sliced bread: made from wheat that most likely came from genetically modified seed, then cultivated using methods of mono-cropping and excessively sprayed with chemicals. The next step is processing with large machines using large volumes of foreign oil, and sent to a large factory to be processed and stripped from the majority of essential nutrients. When all is said and done, the loaf of bread full of preservatives is sliced to uniform sandwich sized pieces and slipped into plastic bags to be shipped across the country.

Now, what is not to love about that? We as consumers can peel off a slice of bread from the loaf at our convenience and we don’t even need to think about any of those steps it took to bring that bread to our plate. We can remove our selves completely from the chain, our part is simply a once a week trip to the store and few dollars.

What happened to making bread—letting the dough rise, experiencing the moment when you just start to smell the bread baking, and pulling that golden loaf from the oven and waiting for it to cool before you (gasp) slice the bread yourself.

With all things considered, it may be possible there are greater things than sliced bread—I’m just sayin’.