Random Retro Riffraff #10: Euphrates Crackers Solve the 1964 Bread Crisis

1964 was a turbulent time in our nation’s history. War protests raged from New York to San Francisco. The pop charts teemed with teen-death anthems—“Last Kiss,” “Leader of the Pack.” And in suburban dining rooms across the country, American husbands were doing the unthinkable: demanding bread, each and every night, in quantities never duplicated before or since.

It didn’t matter how many hours Betty had spent ironing doilies that day, or how deeply Gladys had prayed for spontaneous combustion when Johnny knocked over the Tang display in the supermarket. When the average Bill or Bob rattled home on the commuter train and parked his derriere at the dinner table, it was clear what he wanted. He wanted his daily bread. And he wanted it hot, fast, and now.

Thank goodness, then, for the good people at Euphrates Cracker.

Far from the instant resolution overpromised in the ad, the Euphrates effect was slow at first. When wives began filling bread baskets with a half-sleeve of Mild Onion Euphrates and quietly setting them between the peas and pot pie, many husbands revolted. Some contented themselves with sullen grunts. Others revealed a more monstrous nature and overturned entire dinner tables; bread, they felt, was a right bestowed upon them at birth and a duty conferred on wives by the same natural order that had assigned them “vacuuming” and “smiling through the pain.” Challenges to these assumptions simply would not stand.

Gradually, though, sometime between the Beatles’ first and second appearances on Ed Sullivan, food historians began to note a small but remarkable shift. Women were standing their ground, and many men began to acquiesce to the cracker, accepting the likes of tunafish-on-Euphrates as their new reality.  At the end of 1966, wives reported an overall 26% decrease in bread demands. Grocery stores stopped rationing yeast. By June of 1967, against the odds and contrary to forecasts, the national bread crisis was over.

To those who say “it could never happen again,” take an inventory of your own kitchen cabinet. How much bread have you got? Probably at least half a loaf. And how many boxes of Euphrates?

I thought so.

Tonight, try your grilled cheese on crackers instead. Because the monster might live inside you, too.