Do you know how many things have been invented since Otto Frederick Rohwedder perfected his bread-slicing machine in 1928? Like, loads. There have been at least 10 iPhones since then, plus a machine that can literally harness the power of the stars. Yet when someone wants to hype up a new product today, they don’t say, it’s the best thing “since Bluetooth” or “the rocket that took man to the moon” or even “the polio vaccine”. They say it’s the best thing since sliced bread – because, nearly a century on, we still haven’t invented anything better.
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Soft, pillowy white bread that sticks to the roof of your mouth when untoasted – that you squish into a ball and bite into as a kid, that you pack in lunchboxes and on picnics and fry in beaten eggs – is something many of us know is worth dying earlier for. It is a comfort food so comforting that, according to Warburtons chairman Jonathan Warburton, sales rose during Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. “The staple white sliced bread is most certainly not dead,” said the breadman after consumer behaviour firm Circana found that sales of pre-packed white loaves are up 0.6% compared with this time last year – while sales of all other surveyed bread categories declined.
Of course, what’s good news for Warburton isn’t necessarily great for everyone else. It’s worth scrutinising the way the economic crisis is affecting our diets and health, and it’s sad that – according to Hovis commercial director Alistair Gaunt – “shoppers are buying fewer different types of bread for their household” thanks to feeling squeezed. What I want more than anything is for everyone to be able to afford the bread they like best. Yet I can’t help but rejoice at the return of white bread, simply because of how much I despise its cruel, hard, glamorous cousin from out of town – the bread that has spent the last few years taking over cafes across the country. I’m talking about the worst girl I’ve ever met: sourdough.
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I recently paid £11 for a club sandwich. Extortionate, but it would be worth it – or so I thought. As I waited for my order, my mouth watered at the thought of the jammy egg with the right-kind-of-chewy chicken, the bread snugly squeezing the fillings together. Yet when it arrived at my table and I took a bite, I found that the insides of my sandwich slipped and slid about, barely held together by two slabs of tough, brown sourdough. My fury was hard and unyielding, like the crusts I couldn’t eat.
It is not that sourdough is always or inherently evil – spread with jam, held in your hand, I can see why it was the pandemic’s most popular pal. Yet sourdough has somehow become the de facto bread for sandwiches and loaded toasts. The ridiculousness of this situation becomes apparent when a waiter hands you a steak knife to eat your eggs and avocado with. This is a knife that admits, right to your face, that the bread on your plate is too inflexible.
It takes but one brave little boy to declare that the emperor is naked, so I shall be he. Bread should not cut and scrape the roof of your mouth! Sandwiches should be so soft that our jaws continue to be measurably worse than those of our caveman ancestors! “But,” you might say, because people love to say but – “isn’t sourdough super healthy? Isn’t it good for gut health and super nutritious?” What if I told you that your gums are potentially being shredded by bread that is no better for you than some thick sliced white?
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According to the Real Bread Campaign, run by non-profit food alliance Sustain, many shops are currently selling “sourfaux”, which is filled with additives and preservatives and not made with the real, fermented sourdough starter that gives sourdough its nutritional edge.
To my mind, then, white bread has more than earned its comeback. I don’t think it’s just a money thing – even Waitrose customers are turning back to the trusty old classic, with the supermarket reporting a 17% rise in sliced white bread sales in the year leading to September 2022. I think – I hope – we have simply opened our eyes. There is only one bread that deserves to entomb our fish fingers and our bacon and our crisps. Speaking after Circana’s findings, Roberts Bakery insight manager Rachael Chard called white bread a “blank canvas”, adding: “Consumers can experiment with interesting sandwiches and toasted sandwiches – and white bread, whether standard or premium, is usually the ideal base.” I’ll eat to that.
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I hope we continue to invent more rockets and vaccines, but I also hope that scientists will soon fuel our bread slicers with the stars. There is a reason that no other invention has taken over the idiom. Yet somehow, simultaneously, sourdough has taken over our cafes. For shame – no more, please. Sourdough sandwiches are the worst thing since sliced bread.
