Poster advertising one of the new mass-produced brands of bread. In her 1913 study of the south London poor, Round About a Pound a Week (the income of over a quarter of all families), Maud Pember Reeves wrote

Bread…is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked; it is always at hand and needs no plate and spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam or margarine, according to the length of purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health…It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals a day.