While bread has been a human staple for millennia, the convenience of pre-sliced bread is a relatively modern invention. Otto Frederick Rohwedder created the first automatic bread-slicing machine, which was first used by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. Initially, bakers were skeptical, fearing that sliced bread would go stale too quickly. To solve this, Rohwedder added a wrapping feature to the machine to maintain freshness. The product was marketed as 'the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped,' which eventually evolved into the popular idiom 'the greatest thing since sliced bread.' During World War II, the US government briefly banned sliced bread to conserve wax paper and metal, but the public outcry was so significant that the ban was lifted within weeks.