Any way you slice it

A reader comment to a recent article in The Guardian asked why bread slices have gotten thicker over the years. The same reader lamented that you cannot find thin sliced bread in the supermarket any more, and that by making the slices thicker, food companies were contributing to obesity issues. While I do not know if bread has actually gotten thicker over the years, if it is like any other product (at least in the US), I wouldn’t be surprised if the portions have increased in size.

Very few varieties of thin sliced bread are on offer in markets around me, and all are labeled “lite” or some variation thereof. Likewise, there are few thickly sliced breads, usually just one or two per store, called “Texas toast” (because everything is bigger in Texas). As an interesting aside, I have noticed that bread baked and sliced in the bakery department seems to have thinner slices than the packaged products sitting on the shelves. I am at a loss to explain why.

Of course, if you make your own bread, your slices can be any thickness you desire: thin for tea sandwiches or thick for French toast. Just one more reason to bake it yourself. A few more notes on the subject: Mel Brooks (born 1926) is older than sliced bread (first sold in 1928), and just five years after its invention, 80% of the bread sold in the US was pre-sliced. Also, some researchers posit that selling bread pre-sliced led to greater consumption of bread. So maybe the thickness of bread is not as important to any health issues as the convenience of not having to spend time slicing it.