Posts Tagged ‘sliced bread’
“But if you’re gonna dine with them cannibals / Sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten”*…
A select few athletes are so iconic, they’re known by a single name. Jordan. The Babe. Serena. Pelé. Tiger. Shaq.
And, of course, Kobayashi.
The godfather of competitive eating, Takeru Kobayashi burst onto the American scene at the 2001 Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, where the lithe 5-foot-8 Japanese 23-year-old, using a revolutionary water-dipping technique and a body-wiggling maneuver known as the “Kobayashi Shake,” ate an astounding 50 hot dogs—double the prior record. That feat thrust Kobayashi to instant superstardom, and his subsequent five wins at the famed July 4th competition only solidified his standing as the king of the eating world—a title he’d only officially relinquish in 2007, when American Joey Chestnut dethroned him at the Nathan’s extravaganza.
The tumultuous saga of Kobayashi and Chestnut is the subject of ESPN’s latest “30 for 30” documentary, The Good, The Bad, The Hungry, which details the stratospheric rise and controversial fall of Kobayashi, whose reign was cut short by losses to Chestnut (winner of 11 Nathan’s contests, and a multi-world record holder), a falling-out with Major League Eating (MLE) and its co-founder George Shea, and an eye-opening arrest at the 2010 Nathan’s event…
More on this epic rivaltry at “The Rise and Fall of Kobayashi, Godfather of Competitive Eating: ‘They Were Making a Joke of Me’.” Find The Good, The Bad, The Hungry here.
* Nick Cave
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As we go for the gold, we might recall that it was on this date in 1928 that sliced bread was sold for the first time, by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
For more on this seminal development, see “What was the best thing before sliced bread?”
“What was the best thing before sliced bread?”*…
Rohwedder’s bread slicer in use by the Papendick Bakery Company in St. Louis
Some products are so ubiquitous that it can feel as if they were never invented at all.
Take sliced bread. Around 130 years ago, the idea of buying a pre-sliced loaf would have been met with confusion, writes Jesse Rhodes for Smithsonian Magazine. “In 1890, about 90 percent of bread was baked at home, but by 1930, factories usurped the home baker,” Rhodes writes. But the two breads weren’t the same thing–”factory breads were also incredibly soft,” she writes, making them difficult to slice properly at home with a bread knife.
Since breadmaking had moved to factories, why not bread slicing as well? On this day in 1928, in Chillicothe, Missouri, the Chillicothe Baking Company became, in the words of its plaque, “The Home of Sliced Bread.” It was the place where the bread-slicing machine was first installed, wrote J. J. Thompson for Tulsa World in 1989. Thompson was speaking with the son of the bread-slicing machine’s inventor, Richard O. Rohwedder. His father, Otto F. Rohwedder, was a jeweler who started work on the bread-slicing project years before…
It took a surprising amount of technological know-how to make the bread that birthed the expression: “Take a Look at the Patents Behind Sliced Bread.”
* George Carlin
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As we reach for the PB and J, we might recall that it was on this date in 1868 that Alvin J. Fellows patented his Improvement in Tape Measures– the first spring-click (retractable) tape measure.
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