On July 7, 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, began selling the first machine-sliced bread using an invention by Otto Frederick Rohwedder, who had spent over a decade developing a bread-slicing machine that could cut loaves uniformly without crushing them. The pre-sliced loaves, marketed as "Kleen Maid Sliced Bread," were an immediate commercial success and were soon adopted by bakeries across America. Sliced bread made soft, white bread significantly more convenient to use for sandwiches and toast, accelerating the dominance of processed white bread over whole-grain and artisanal varieties and giving rise to the phrase "the greatest thing since sliced bread."

Sliced white bread became a powerful symbol in American poetry for both the comforts and the conformity of mid-century life, appearing in the work of poets like Robert Frost and James Wright who used bread imagery to explore questions of authenticity and mass production. The phrase "the greatest thing since sliced bread" entered common poetic and rhetorical language, while the contrast between handmade and machine-sliced bread became a metaphor in contemporary food poetry for the loss of craft and the ambivalent pleasures of convenience that define modern consumer culture.