I think there was a bit of a backlash against sauces from the gen-x and millennial crowd, and that may explain why they can’t make gravy. Popularity and fashion

I think there was a bit of a backlash against sauces from the gen-x and millennial crowd, and that may explain why they can’t make gravy. Popularity and fashion explains a lot, and gravy was NOT popular during the gen-x and millennial eras. I think this is just because we got bad TV dinners drowning in sauce, nothing more or less than that. The baby boomers I know had a similar backlash against canned goods—boomers had plenty of awful canned Lima beans made into casseroles growing up, and it put many of them off canned goods in general, for better or worse. Just another example of fashion in food—lard is coming back in fashion as an ingredient in home cooking, and in the UK, brown sauce is going out of fashion.