oh there's lots of videos about the rise of jello in American cuisine. i haven't seen any recently, and don't feel like going through the effort of vetting a good one right now, but yeah, just look up something along those lines. it was considered a modern miracle of food science and quite trendy for a bit there. it was also heavily featured in one or more prominent government cookbooks in like the 50s being used in this kind of way. i don't remember many of the details, but i think it was basically from a time when people were excited by new chemicals in their food and trusted scientists in s lab more than farmers in the field to make safe consistently available food. this was a similar time to wonder bread coming to popularity because flour contamination was becoming quiet prominent. we were entering a time when our population has reached modern scales, but our sanitation practices and knowledge hadn't caught up.