Grocery-shopping with grandson Charlie early Wednesday brought us smack-dab into contact with “the bread man.” In fact, Charlie nearly ran into his tower of racks as it lumbered down Aisle 8. Fortunately, the man sensed a child in the way and screeched the whole thing to a halt.

This bread man loads up his truck, presumably quite early, and drives from supermarket to supermarket, dispensing product across a large area. If there were no bread man, there would be no bagels, no loaves of white, wheat, or raisin bread, no hot-dog buns, and no English muffins on the shelves.

While not a bread lover myself, I recognize bread as the staff of life, at least within the Western tradition. From soft clouds of puffy white bread to hearty bricks of 21-grained loaves, bread fuels daily life.

My parents were teenagers during the years when the words “sliced bread” got tacked onto the phrase “the next best thing to.” They spoke these words not merely as a trendy saying. Their childhood was anchored in the ancient reality that, without homemade bread, there would be no bread. To have experienced the spread of commercially baked bread wrapped in wax paper and sliced by a machine would have been really something.

Sliced bread came from the vision of an Iowa inventor Otto Rohwedder (1880-1960) who built a bread-slicing machine in 1912. Still, it took until 1928 for his prototype to be implemented as a working model. Once a working machine appeared in a bakery in Chillicothe Missouri, ready-sliced bread quickly became the new standard.

A strange blip in the reign of “sliced bread” did occur in 1943 when the US government banned commercially produced sliced bread. I know it sounds odd, but sliced bread was floppier than solid loaves, so more packaging was needed. The war effort needed to take precedence. If any truth to the situation existed, it was more likely the desire to conserve the steel used for the machine’s slicing blades.

Still, the pushback against the ban on sliced bread was immediate. Consider the plight of this poor lady when she penned her now-famous letter of complaint:

I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. Without ready-sliced bread I must do the slicing for toast—two pieces for each one—that’s ten. For their lunches I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward I make my own toast. Twenty-two slices of bread to be cut in a hurry!

The sliced-bread ban did not last long: around two months, to be exact.

And so, let me return to the tall, tattoo-covered young fellow pushing his pallets down Aisle 8. He was helping to direct a shopper to a different area, so he initially did not hear my statement of thanks for doing what he does (including not running over my grandson). I said something like “Thank you for doing what it takes to bring this bread to us.” He probably thought I was weird.

Yet it is weird if we do not thank such people! He, and tens of thousands of other folks just like him, deserve our thanks daily. They, like the bakers, the truckers who delivered the wheat to the bakers, the millers who ground the wheat, and the farmers and harvesters who grew and reaped the wheat, are the reasons we are alive. Every product we see in a grocery store, whether essential or superfluous, sits on the shelf because of a similar invisible chain of labor and dedication. It is startlingly easy to forget this.

So, as we enter the season where gratitude finally makes it to the front page, let us remember, amid recounting the “things” we are grateful for, this multitude of men and women who labor behind the scene, making it possible for us to reach out our arms and grab the extraordinary multiplicity of items that stock our refrigerators and pantries, fill our medicine cabinets, stuff our drawers, and hang in our closets. I cannot begin to fathom all of these people, or all that they do. But they are working right at this moment, no matter what time it is when you read these words.

And so, Mr. Bread Man, to you, and to each of your fellow spirits, I sing my sincerest gratitude.