Sometimes stark truths are told through kitchen appliances. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was a young mother when she popped four pieces of bread in the toaster and forgot about them. Long story short, bread became flaming toast, toaster became sparking monster. Since then, some wise soul decided to add a timer with an automatic shut-off.

WORCESTER — Sometimes stark truths are told through kitchen appliances.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was a young mother when she popped four pieces of bread in the toaster and promptly forgot about them. Long story short, bread became flaming toast, toaster became sparking monster.

That year, she told a standing-room-only crowd at Worcester State University's Ghosh Science and Technology Center on Friday afternoon, she started a lot of kitchen fires. She recalled that back then, toasters had an on-off switch, but no mechanism to save the forgetful from themselves. Along the way, some wise soul decided to add a timer with an automatic shut-off.

Reading an excerpt from her new book "A Fighting Chance," Ms. Warren continued: "Thirty years later, while working on an article about how the government could protect consumers, I thought about those old toaster ovens. By then, it was all but impossible to buy a toaster that had a 1 in 5 chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But by the 2000s," she continued, "it was possible to refinance a home with a mortgage that had a 1 in 5 chance of costing a family their home."

By 2007, she said, a government agency was monitoring potentially exploding toasters and just about everything else for basic safety — but in 2007, she said, there was no agency to stop the sale of exploding mortgages. Thus began her rocky path to establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

With folksy anecdotes, impassioned pleas and a fair amount of self-deprecating humor, Ms. Warren roused the all-ages audience to cheers, whistles and occasional shout-outs as she discussed the mortgage crisis, the erosion of the middle class and the ramifications of astronomical student loan debt.

She talked about her parents' struggles after her carpet-salesman father had a heart attack ("we had our toes right on the edge of losing our home") and her mother's squeezing herself into her good dress and landing a minimum-wage job at Sears. The family did lose their car, but they kept their home. Ms. Warren reminded the audience that this was the 1960s, when a minimum wage job would keep a family of three out of poverty. (Her three older brothers were out of the house by then.)

Ms. Warren said she received "a fine education" for $50 a semester at commuter college, "because I grew up in an America that was investing in education…that was investing in kids like me."

She spoke of a post-Depression America that built a future for its kids by investing in education, infrastructure and research, and by putting strong rules in place to level the playing field.

"It was all about having a cop on the beat," she said. "No one should be able to steal your purse on Main Street…or steal your pension on Wall Street," she said. As the country got richer, she said, our families got richer; and as our families got richer, our country got richer. "That's when America built a great middle class."

But about 30 years ago, the GOP started pushing a different idea: "Leave the cops on Main Street, not on Wall Street." Let the big banks load up on risks; let them put a big bull's-eye on the backs of every working family."

Deregulation, she said, became the mantra of the day. College kids are getting crushed with debt, she said, citing $1.2 trillion collectively owed by 40 million Americans, "and this country is bleeding millions into loopholes and subsidies that go to rich corporations."

"The game is rigged," Ms. Warren said. "But we can whine, we can whimper or we can fight back.

"That little financial agency?" she said proudly, referring to the CFPB, "We did that."

Contact Sara Schweiger at sara.schweiger@telegram.com. Follow her on Twitter @sschweigertg.