Nothing Is Better Than Sliced Bread

I don't make a lot of sandwiches. I tend to take the laziest route possible when making my lunch for school, and it's a lot easier to take some leftovers to school than go through the laborious process of making an entire sandwich. But sometimes I get in the mood to make a sandwich, which nearly always ends up being a much harder task to accomplish than you'd think. You see, my parents don't eat a lot of carbs, so we don't often have the sandwich base of sliced bread at home. Instead, I have to repurpose some other kind of bread to make my sandwich, which doesn't create a sandwich nearly satisfactory enough.

Nothing works nearly as well as sliced bread to make a sandwich. You can slice your own loaf of bread to create slices, but unless you have magically perfect eyeballing skills, your slices will be noticeably uneven. Or, if you suck at slicing things like I do, you'll underestimate how thick a slice of bread needs to be and end up cutting it so thin you can see the light come through it when you hold the slice up to a lamp. Pre-sliced bread avoids that unfortunate situation by crafting perfectly even and precise slices of processed bread.

But the merits of sliced bread don't stop at sandwiches. When you've got the flu and can't keep anything down, the perfect solution is a simple slice of toast. And when you're dizzy from spending all day in bed with a fever and only getting up to throw up, you don't have the time or energy to pull out a bread knife and behead a section of bread from the mother loaf. Pre-sliced bread is just convenient for everyone. It saves valuable time that could be spent doing other things, like eating the bread. Who wants to spend the time to slice a loaf of bread up for a recipe when you can be cooking your food instead?

And when it comes to cooking, sliced bread provides an ease that regular bread cannot. For example, it enables a more even bake on French toast. Technically, you can flip the toasts individually if they brown at different speeds, but it's significantly easier to do them all at once. In general, you could use regular bread in recipes, just like I could move to Texas and start an oil company under a pseudonym. Who wants to put the work in to do that? Perhaps for special occasions, you might buy an unsliced loaf of bread, since they tend to be higher quality. But for everyday life, you don't need to spend the extra dollars for your bread.

My point is, sliced bread is cheap and convenient. You have your choice of white bread or healthier grain bread at every grocery store. To find a classic loaf of bread, you'd have to go to a special store or seriously hunt through the aisles at County Market, and who has time for that? Sliced bread was truly invented for the lazy cook (if you count making sandwiches as cooking).

There's a reason we say something is "the best thing since sliced bread." It's because nothing after the invention of sliced bread can top it. It may not be the best thing humankind has ever created, but I'm still very grateful for its existence.