In many circles, processed foods have come to seem bad, even immoral. What fascinates me, though, is how food engineers look at food. What problems are they trying to solve? What tools do they have at their disposal? What are their points-of-proof and methods? Food engineers don't think about food the way the rest of us do. For them, it's a material like steel or drywall or duct tape. They are concerned with building something and it just so happens that we eat this end result. This isn't the moralizing story that you've heard so many times; this is just how gravy mixes developed, their chemistry and technological history.

Our story begins back in the 19th century. Philip Thorne filed a patent in 1882 for a floury product that could be mixed with water to create an instant dough. "The object of my invention is to manufacture a new and improved prepared flour, which needs only be mixed with water to form a dough for a biscuit; and the invention consists in thoroughly incorporating butter deprived of its water with flour and baking-powder."

But the instant biscuit dough wasn't an instant success. Dry mixes -- just add water! -- didn't really catch on for decades. It wasn't until 1931 that Bisquick came onto the market, and not until the 1950s that the baking aid really took off. Cake mixes like Betty Crocker's followed shortly thereafter and exploded in popularity, becoming what the author of Paradox of Plenty, Harvey Levenstein, called "one of the great marketing success stories of all time." One key trick was that the original mixes just required water, leaving housewives feeling a little left out of the cake making process. So, General Mills switched up the recipe to require cracking a single egg into the mix, then adding water. And in that way, cakes got made. "By 1950, one theme had come to dominate all else: convenience," Levenstein notes.

As in baking, so it went with gravies, too. All kinds of gravy mixes came onto the market, proclaiming their greatness. But gravies were actually a more difficult mix to create. Just like homecooks might like to have gravy without having to actually cook meat, the food processing industry needed to eliminate the actual beef or chicken.

You could have gravy without all the trouble of making the meat that would generate the drippings. In a curiously parallel movement, the food processing industry also wanted to eliminate actually cooking meat to generate that meaty gravy flavor. In fact, industry actually needed to. It would be far too expensive to cook a bunch of meat, keep the drippings, and throw away the rest.

"The gravy mixes are a little more sophisticated because the flavor from a gravy mix may be a beef gravy, but it's never been near a cow," said Gary A. Reineccius, a food scientist at the University of Minnesota. "To me, some of the real innovations that have occurred in gravy have been in the flavoring systems."