Seventies food seems always to be coming “back” into fashion, so long as it is served with a touch of irony. You don’t need to have lived through the decade to chortle knowingly while hoovering up flaky vol-au-vents. Nor to imagine the excitement in our house circa 1978 when my glamorous eldest sister conjured up that magic potion, prawn cocktail sauce, from the most modest of ingredients, and transformed a chocolate sponge into a Black Forest gâteau.
Those “retro” dishes have an identity far stronger than any from the surrounding decades because they were the visible tip of a huge, dizzying amount of change. “Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is,” one of Tom Stoppard’s early-20th-century characters says about electricity – and it might apply, too, to the changes in the way we shopped, cooked and entertained in the Seventies. Ordinary families started having drinks parties with cheese-and-pineapple hedgehogs; kids had friends over for Findus Crispy Pancakes and butterscotch Angel Delight. Restaurants lured whole families into going “out for a meal” with impossible-to-make-at-home chicken kiev; hostesses dared louche cheese fondue; wine replaced tea on some dinner tables as TV chefs explained how to cook with, and drink, it. Food became glossier – magazine photos flashed devilled eggs or satin-y chicken chasseur – and sometimes, like those glittery aspic moulds, ridiculous.
As women increasingly worked outside the home, market-research interviews suggested that the niggling concern about being “a proper housewife” was giving way to anxiety about getting everything done in time. The high street offered nifty time-savers; the barcode was launched in 1974 as was the first UK McDonald’s. Freezers gave us the quick thrill of Sara Lee cheesecakes and the Arctic roll and even, in 1979, chicken kiev (thanks to M&S). In what sociologists called a “value shift”, making an ordinary meal began to be described as the uncomfortable-sounding “cooking from scratch”; friction-free convenience was the thing.
A globalising economy followed up oil-crisis food inflation in the early Seventies with cheaper commodities. Membership of the EU and technologies lowered the cost of some foods. Cheaper groceries, however, don’t satisfy profit-hungry shareholders. While a couple of supermarkets aimed for profits through elevated quality and prices, the standard model came to be: pile it high and sell it cheap. Grocers began to realise that if they adopted the American model of self-service customers bought more. Selling more – with tens of thousands of products, faster checkouts, deals, petrol stations attached to gargantuan out-of-town stores, and the magic of advertising (especially on TV) – became the defining mission of the supermarkets, and remains so to the present day.
The simplest trick, though, is to sell food in “portions” and to make them bigger. Go to the fantastic Museum of Brands in London and peer at Seventies food packets. A cardboard box about the size of a CD case encloses a pizza for one. Chocolate bars are Lilliputian. Crisp packets, pots of instant noodles and ready meals are around half the size of their contemporary equivalents.
No industry can give us more than the existing 24 hours in a day; it can only influence how we spend them. Our ability to munch, though, doesn’t have the same restrictions. The liberation from the time-consuming burden of making our own food provided not more minutes but more calories. And it turns out that those calories end up costing us time. In October, the Food Foundation calculated that in the UK 755,212 years of our lives are affected by food-related ill health.
Not even the dreamiest of nostalgics could claim the Seventies were a decade of healthy, delicious food. But the food industry 50 years ago wasn’t driving its customers into time-sapping illnesses and the NHS into bankruptcy. The thrilling novelty of Vesta Curry or coq au vin were occasional landmarks in a sea of modestly portioned, homemade ordinariness, which turned out to be better for our health. It leaves us as a nation with the paradoxical question of whether we could add years of productive life by going back in time.
[See also: “Onegin” at the Royal Opera House: a spectacular blur]
This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War