Actual thought I had in the shower!

Gelatin was originally and still often is derived from meat by-products, so wouldn’t it make more sense as a meat dish?

I looked it up, and it turns out that accounts of aspic (a savory gelatin dish) predate the earliest record of gelatin desserts by more than half a millennium!

Maybe the mid-20th-century meat Jell-O trend makes more sense than I thought