Growing up and not knowing what your body is reacting to is pretty rubbish! As a result I'm sure I'm left with psychosomatic symptoms - for instance - the smell of onions makes me gag so I can't be near them! As a kid I used to hold my breath whilst unloading the dishwasher as I didn't know why I felt sick.
Because of this I never used to like "wet foods" - gravy being top of that list. So I grew up liking very dry foods - I would even have a glass of milk along side my cereal rather than combine it and eat soggy food! I think in my early development my brain recognised that "wet food" was statistically more dangerous and so I avoided it.
There are some random upshots to this - Not eating the fattier/richer foods meant I was less likely to put on weight (this isn't scientifically proven but as I start to look back and understand more I am making more sense of other things too - this seems to be logical - but I appreciate I also was very active as a child and ate a lot of sweets - so I could be talking rubbish and it was probably a number of factors!)
Another random upshot is I can eat 3 Jacobs cream crackers pretty quickly - as I guess I my saliva glands compensated over the years for all the dry food!
A MAJOR factor I have developed (again in my opinion - there may be other factors at play here) is my sense of taste. My taste buds appear to be heightened. I don't need seasoning on food - in fact, in my opinion it detracts from good food. Good steak is good steak and needs nothing more on it. What I'm slowly starting to realise is I have been tasting with the basic pallet and through combining the ingredients one creates a richer taste/pallet to experience. But I still hold onto the fact that you need a decent red, blue yellow before you paint a rich green, purple and orange!
All this meant that it's only as an adult I have actually made gravy myself. I'm still not sure if it adds much to my enjoyment of a roast meal but my partner and friends like it so I use the leftover beef/chicken juices and combine it with cornflour and the following two stocks....the ONLY two that don't have onion powder/juice in it! (again the Knorr pot has leek in it so others may react to it)