
Pre-Sliced Bread Was Once Banned in the United States (2010) - Tomte
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/11/pre-sliced-bread-was-once-banned-in-the-united-states/
======
bjt
That same Secretary of Agriculture was also responsible for one of the more
surprising cases I remember from law school.

Question: Does the Constitution's interstate commerce clause give Congress the
power to regulate how much wheat a farmer can grow for his own consumption, if
it's never sold to anyone else and never crosses state lines?

The district court said no. The Supreme Court said yes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)

~~~
erikpukinskis
Interesting. He was growing wheat to feed animals. The court decided that him
withdrawing from the interstate wheat market was equivalent to him
participating in the interstate wheat market. Because in both cases you are
affecting the interstate market.

Doesn’t make much sense to me.

If they had said, he’s selling the animals made from wheat across state lines,
so the production is regulable, that would at least give me an idea of what
kinds of activity are not regulable.

But as it stands, it seems like as long as there is one supply chain that
crosses state lines, anyone engaging in any of the same activities are subject
to federal oversight. Even if they are operating distinctly from that supply
chain, and distributing only within state lines.

Seems impossibly broad to me.

But maybe I’m misunderstanding and it was selling the animals across state
lines that triggered the federal jurisdiction.

~~~
dantheman
You're not misunderstanding it - it was a giant power grab, and the federal
government can say anything that affects interstate commerce is within their
purview.

~~~
joeblow9999
its a cornerstone of the deug war

------
FiddlerClamp
Interestingly, so was yellow-colored margarine.

"Oleomargarine", as they used to call it, is an off-white color. To make it
more appealing to butter users, oleo manufacturers added yellow coloring,
until the butter lobby appealed. I believe this regulation was overturned in
the late 1960s.

~~~
mirimir
So they sold the coloring separately, in a small packet, and the user could
mix it in.

~~~
FiddlerClamp
Wow, I didn't know that, thanks! I love pop culture trivia like that.

------
ZhuanXia
If only the downsides of all regulations were so transparent and causally
obvious to the public.

~~~
squirrelicus
Yeah. There was one recently around Domino's and accessibility that made me
cringe so hard. But the general sentiment from HN seemed to be in favor of a
new regulation to mandate all websites implement accessibility. Scary.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20589788#20597127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20589788#20597127)
\- "Domino’s asks SCOTUS to shut down a lawsuit requiring its website be
accessible (theverge.com)".

The consensus as I read it was accessibility should be such that no one is
disadvantaged by disabilities unnecessarily and that means that they should
make online discounts accessible to all by making their website accessible
[according to WCAG standards].

In the UK this is required by the Disability Discrimination Act, companies
have to make "reasonable" adjustments to enable access (where reasonable is
_inter alia_ a function of the costs and business size too).

I understand that USA have a DDA too with a very similar requirement and so it
appears that no new legislation is required to get Domino's to act, just a
court order or someone at Domino's deciding they care about accessibility.

~~~
Mirioron
This reminds me of the situation where video games now require that if you add
text chat to a game, then you also need to add voice-to-text and text-to-voice
to accommodate people with disabilities. Then you need to also test it with a
bunch of people that suffer from these disabilities. There are some
exceptions, but you need to at least document that you assessed whether you
can afford to add this feature or not before release. [0]

Accessibility is important, but things like this can easily overstep their
bounds to the degree that it can stifle competition. It would've made far more
sense to work towards some unified OS features that would allow for such
functionality, instead of putting the burden onto the application developer.

[0] [https://www.3playmedia.com/2019/03/18/the-cvaa-video-game-
ac...](https://www.3playmedia.com/2019/03/18/the-cvaa-video-game-
accessibility/)

~~~
hirsin
Those OS features do largely exist (speech to text slightly less so) and are
readily available for developers to interact with, often worked into the
framework of choice already.

Except Electron, where you get to reimplement everything.

------
goldcd
My takeaway thought from the article was that "pre-sliced" != "long-life"

I'd always assumed that pre-sliced came along after long-life/'functional'
bread came along. Quite appreciated the fact that the pre-slicing originally
had an impact on it going stale (but then this opens up the question around
why slicing was considered a chore.. few seconds with a decent knife?)

~~~
whenchamenia
If my friends and family are any measure, a household with a nice sharp knife
is not in the majority. The number of squished flat rolls is astounding.
Grating your own cheese is also just as easy, but most people cant be arsed to
do that either.

~~~
mieseratte
I don’t think it’s “can’t be arsed” so much as, for a lot of people, it’s not
even on the radar.

Growing up, cooking was basically throwing some meat on the grill or in the
coven and steaming some veggies. Maybe some pre-mix rice, instant potatoes,
etc. Throw on some name-brand sauce, Heinz or some BBQ sauce. Christmas and
Thanksgiving you might get fancier, from-scratch stuffing, gravy, and some
baked goods.

That’s how I learned to cook Which is to say I really didn’t know how to in
any meaningful sense. About a year ago I binged one of Anthony Bourdain’s
shows, and at the same time some friends started a routine Sunday dinner.
Those two inspired and clicked the idea in my head that this is something I
could do, that it’s not reserved for trained chefs and people who spent their
childhoods in the kitchen.

Shitty food culture focused on convenience is a big culprit. Friction and fear
mean people don’t branch out, sticking with what they know.

