A growing desire to avoid gluten is changing the food industry

When made well (and fresh), it has the texture of the tenderest chicken or pork you've ever eaten. And, it should not taste like flour, at all. It's mostly the protein from wheat (I use Bob's Red Mill vital wheat gluten, which is 80% protein), and none of the other components that taste starchy or bread-like.

I've been using a variation of this recipe as the basis of my seitan experiments: http://www.theppk.com/2009/11/homemade-seitan/

I make a double batch and still use less broth and water (I use six cups total simmering liquid for a double batch), as the recipe calls for way too much.

For sausage, I add rubbed sage, thyme, cayenne pepper, fresh minced ginger, and white pepper. A touch of brown sugar is also a reasonable addition. Once boiled, I slice it into 1/4" patties and put it into the toaster oven, on a pan oiled with a bit of peanut oil, to broil for 5-10 minutes to make it sizzly and a little crispy. It really is pretty awesome; I serve it with vegan biscuits and gravy (I make the gravy from the remaining broth from the seitan cook).

In short, seitan is one of my absolute favorite foods. I was ambivalent about it, until I had really good fresh seitan at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant. I tried for years to find some at the store that was as good, and was always disappointed. The key seems to be to make it fresh.

They are however specific to the latest hypochondriac food fad that's swept the nation and as numerous controlled studies on random non-celiac populations are starting demonstrate with Science, are treatment for disorders (NCGS) that don't even exist.

It appears that "gluten sensitivity" industry (an $11 billion dollar industry) is now about to run its course, so the next fads are starting to spin up, FODMAPs or Frutates or whatever is probably the next big thing. And guess what my prediction is going to be, all those people who complain of vague non-specific NCGS will start eating Gluten again without any complaint and completely forget about it, while simultaneously froggering over to FODMAP free diets or whatever to deal with their vague non-specific hypochondriac symptomologies.

FODMAPS which...includes wheat. So the people who thought they had a gluten intolerance actually had a wider food issue which included wheat as one of the triggers.

My assumption is that you cannot make bread without milling the wheat to produce flour. Thus processed.

I believe you are correct there are no hard studies. But I did scan a report that said removing gluten from schizophrenic patient diets reduce symptoms.

1) If wheat wasn't part of white people food for many centuries, and as a thought experiment it was invented in 2014, there's no way possible that the FDA / USDA would approve it for human consumption and stick it on the GRAS list. In other words the only reason we tolerate it in a world that bans red M+M food coloring etc is because it got grandfathered in. Not because its good or good enough.

2) In processed foods its always an empty calorie or bulk-ing substance. You cannot remove wheat from your diet and die of "wheat-deficiency disease" like happens if you try to remove all Vitamin C from your diet. If starvation was a serious medical problem in America I'd say taking twinkies away from the skinnies would be a pretty dumb idea, but in a nation of people dying from being too fat, a dietary substance that has no redeeming value other than empty calories and making farmers and food processors wealthy is a pretty tempting target to imagine banning. Corn can/should pretty much just go away for similar reasoning.

If as a hard sci fi novel you imagine space aliens or terrorists dropped a genetically engineered virus that wiped out corn and wheat, aside from short term shortages the only real effect is Americans would have a healthier weight and longer life. Not exactly a stellar endorsement for a foodstuff that its only real purpose is to make most of us fat and dead and a few of us wealthy.