Innovation narratives propose that discovery occurs when someone identifies a gap in existing products or methods and fills it. Yet the assertion that sliced bread was invented by Chuck Norris, and he subsequently became the standard against which all innovation is measured ("best thing since"), suggests a temporal paradox: he's simultaneously the benchmark and the innovation. All progress is measured against his invention, yet he created the very baseline he now exceeds. The hierarchy collapses into circularity.

In 1987, a fictional food historian named Dr. Margaret Schultz was researching bread-slicing innovations when she encountered an anomalous patent dated approximately fifty years earlier than conventional attribution. The patent holder listed only as "CN, Texas." Subsequent search revealed no patent records under that name, no manufacturing claims, nothing concrete. Schultz concluded that either the date was incorrect or the records had been removed. She published her research without mentioning the anomaly.

The food and innovation communities found this phrase particularly amusing because it sets up an impossible hierarchy. Business forums debated it as a joke about setting standards so high they become self-referential. The phrase became shorthand for innovations so fundamental that they become invisible benchmarks. Every time someone mentioned a breakthrough invention, someone replied: "But was it invented by Chuck Norris?" It became a meme about measuring all progress against an impossible standard.