Why Are Loaves Square?
Apparently, we’ve now had the square sliced loaf for fifty years. In my years, that’s fifty years too many.
But have you ever wondered why Britain fell so much in love with this awful product? Here’s an e-mail, I’ve just written to the BBC.
In the 1970s, I did some work for a major bakery group in the UK. I dealt with top management, some of whom had been bakers. And very much of the old school, who knew their bread.
So I asked why we had so much bad sliced bread and did they eat it.
They didn’t eat it and to a man, they took a sack of flour home and then baked it themselves.
The reason there was so much square sliced bread was that van drivers in those days were paid by commission and they could get most commission by cramming that sort of bread in the van. So they wouldn’t distribute the better class of bread, which didn’t fit so well.
Another interesting fact from this period, was that a lot of bread got returned to the factory. Harold Wilson and his government felt this waste pushed up the price of bread, so they banned returns. Do you remember happy bread, which was a different colour for each day?
In fact, the non-return policy, meant that the price of bread rose, as the returned bread had a whole lot of uses like animal feed, which then became unprofitable. The returned bread just went into the waste bin at the shops and then probably into landfill.
All in all it’s a sad tale, which shows that often the reasons for things being the way they are, are not what you’d expect.
I’ve also just watched the BBC Breakfast report on 50 years of the awful sliced loaf. No wonder there are so many coeliacs or those that are allergic to wheat-based bread in the UK, judging by what goes into it. All of those bakers years ago were right!
The Anonymous Widower 
I remember as a child being sent to the shop to buy a “thin sliced flat topped white loaf” and woe betide me if the top wasnt flat enough.
I also used to have to sometimes get “6 oz of lean roded bacon cut on no 6”
To this day I have no idea what “roded” refers to when buying bacon, or indeed, the correct spelling
Comment by liz | June 7, 2011 |
It’s not the shape but the quality that matters. I bought a loaf in that deli in Southgate Road the other day – it was costly but the taste and texture was more than worth it and every scrap was eaten.
Comment by Marc | June 7, 2011 |
Times have changed. In the 1950s, few people appreciated food and you could only buy the square sliced stuff in many shops. I used to do the shopping for my mother about 1951 or so and there were no independent bakers near where we lived. We did have a bread man, who delivered. They just pushed the square sliced stuff.
Comment by AnonW | June 12, 2011 |
[…] well, without any political interference. In fact, in some areas like food, as I showed with the bread story, that interference actually makes things worse. 52.245212 […]
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