Two questions

[ewx]

1) What is the best thing since sliced bread (which apparently dates back to 1928)?

2) What was the best thing before sliced bread?

Comments

[nomme.livejournal.com]

1) Electrice toaster.

2) Bread

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

According to that link:

2) Wrapped bread (!)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Best thing before sliced bread?

Obviously, unsliced bread: one of the advantages of moving to a town (and, later, of improving roads so that villages could support a shop) was that you could buy bread from a baker instead of having to make it yourself.

Before that? Pre-ground flour. Wages (and rations) were paid in Roman times in grain, which you then had to pay to get milled. Or grind it yourself in a quern - a task so onerous that mediaeval peasants would tolerate the landowner's monopoly position as owner of the mill and pay a significant proportion of their earnings (or rather, their labour and barterable produce) to have their grain ground by a miller.

Before that, we can look to the domestication and systematic cultivation of wheat: the neolithic revolution. You had lots of grain to grind, rather than foraged handfuls from wild stands of grass - enough to store, and to form a reliable year-round diet.

...And right back to paleolithic times, we have the invention of the quern, a crude stone tool for hand-grinding grain - at this point, foraged from the wild - so that the flour can be eaten: probably as gruel, though we may also be looking at primitive unleavened bread, somewhat similar to Naan, made by drying and baking gruel on a hot stone.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

The popular use of the phrase derives from the fact that Wonder Bread, the first mass-marketer of sliced bread as a product, launched a 1930s ad campaign touting the innovation.

I've now got visions of a loaf of bread dressed as superman flying through the air

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

1. The internet.
2. Cheese.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

*ponders*

1) the transistor

2) pasteurisation (to pick a random example from the whole 'now stuff that you need to stay alive is less likely to contain nasty stuff that will kill you' family of things)

[redatt.livejournal.com]

1/ easy spread butter substitute

2/ bread knife

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

pay a significant proportion of their earnings (or rather, their labour and barterable produce) to have their grain ground by a miller.

One option was for the miller to take a proportion of the flour in return for his work and equipment. (a.k.a 'multure', which appears to have been somewhere about a sixteenth part of the grain (http://books.google.com/books?id=MQNfrRFmvw4C&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=%22a+sixteenth+part%22+multure&source=bl&ots=S-ffTN15AH&sig=hX2GLWrT-6CQgXJ0dNPbXk9FjWc&hl=en&ei=qu_2Sbu_GtSw-AbJ3MCdDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1).)

(As it happens, my parents bought a water mill in the mid 1960s, but converted it to living accommodation. The building was last a commercial enterprise under the previous owners. I mention this purely for colour, and not as any indication of expertise on my part.)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

2) Cheese

1) Cheese on toast

[angoel.livejournal.com]

1) Perforated Bread
2) Bread

[gerald_duck]

1. Antibiotics
   
2. Evolution

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

1. Cosworth DFV
2. Lungs

[imc.livejournal.com]

1. A bread-making machine.

2. I've a feeling it's the electric light bulb.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

2) Tea.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

so onerous that mediaeval peasants would tolerate the landowner's monopoly position as owner of the mill

Hmmm, I thought - and the source bellinghman cites - that this was tolerated not because hand-milling was onerous, but because it was forbidden, and mediaeval peasants would gladly hand-mill if they thought they could get away with it.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it ought to be tinned baked beans, though I couldn't say whether it's before or after.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

That might be the best thing on top of sliced bread, actually.