On March 26, 1804, President Thomas Jefferson attended a party  
at the Senate and lead a diverse crowd in consuming an enormous
loaf of bread dubbed the mammoth loaf. The giant bread was baked
to go with the remnants of an enormous block of cheese.

Two years earlier, a group of Baptist women from Massachusetts
had sent Jefferson a 1,200- pound hunk of cheese in gratitude
for his support of religious tolerance.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826)

Remember this TV commercial showing senior citizen Clara Peller, right, ordering a burger?

Peller was a Russian-born American manicurist and
television personality. 

Wonder Bread is a brand of sliced bread which was produced by
The Taggart Baking Company of  Indianapolis, Indiana. It debuted
on May 21, 1921.

It was one of the first to be sold pre-sliced nationwide in 1930. It| 
is currently owned by Flowers Foods, headquartered in Thomasville, Georgia.          

World War II restrictions cut deep into every American pantry as
federal officials announced that sliced bread would be rationed
on this day in history, Jan. 18, 1943.

"I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to
the morale and saneness of a household," distraught mother
Sue Forrester of Fairfield, Connecticut, claiming to speak on
behalf of America’s housewives, lamented in a New York Times
letter to the editor.

Wartime rationing had already caused severe restrictions on
the nation’s household food supply. 

Basic resources were devoted in ever-growing volume to the
war effort in 1943, as the tide of battle turned and the U.S. and
its Allies went on the offensive across the vast expanse of two
oceans.

Bread rationing marked the depths of sacrifices on the home
front. 

Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa invented the
first single loaf bread-slicing machine. A prototype he built
in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, and it was not until 1928
that Rohwedder had a fully working machine ready. The
first commercial use of the machine was by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, who sold their
first slices on July 7, 1928.

By 1933, around 80% of bread sold in the US was pre-sliced,
leading to the popular idiom "greatest thing since sliced
bread"

Otto Frederick Rohwedder
(July 7, 1880 – November 8, 1960)

This photograph depicts a "new electrical bread
slicing machine" in use by an unnamed bakery
in St. Louis in 1930.

Kerr Group, Inc. (1992-1996) Businessman and entrepreneur
Alexander Hewitt Kerr (below) organized this company in
Portland, Oregon in 1903 under the name Hermetic Fruit Jar
Company. The official name was changed in 1904 to Kerr
Glass Manufacturing Company.

Kerr offered the ‘Economy’ brand of mason jar produced for
them by the Illinois-Pacific Glass Co.

The company, with offices in Portland, Oregon, was called the
Hermetic Fruit Jar Company. Kerr Glass owned and operated
seven glass plants in various locations throughout the United
States by 1975. Its products were sold nationally by employees
of the company from its twenty-seven sales offices.

(September 4, 1862 – February 9, 1925)