I'm not sure if life ever got any better than when I was seven, sitting in front of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, surrounded by grannies, granddads and tinsel, munching my way through a Cadbury's selection box on Christmas afternoon.

It comes as a surprise that when I look back at my childhood, I'm old enough to be looking at something that has vanished forever. It's quite hard to believe that just a generation ago we were living in a world that was not only without computers – everyone knows that – but it was also a world without yoghurt. It wasn't until plastic packaging became available that it was practical to market yoghurt. Imagine! "Have you ever tried yoghurt?" "No! Wow, what's yoghurt?" The idea of black cherry yoghurt was once every bit as exciting and risqué as snail porridge. No yoghurt! It's like saying there was no such thing as bread: of course there was bread, but not as we know it. It was all medium-sliced tin loaves. No one could even pronounce "baguette", let alone buy one.

Still, the 1970s, when I was growing up, is the most underrated period in gourmet history. Nowadays we quite like things a bit fresh and artisan-made and wonky. In the 1970s, though, food openly embraced the future. The more processes it had been through, the further removed it was from the human hand, the more we wanted it. For that reason "instant" coffee was easily as exciting as anything a coffee snob can throw at you these days. In fact there was altogether a refreshing absence of snobbery. When we ate mashed potato straight out of a packet we knew we were living in the space age, and Angel Delight – well, that was just too good to be true. As well as the thrill of instantaneous food, cooking equipment flowered like fine art in Medici Florence: pressure cookers and microwaves appeared from laboratories; gadgets, too: soda siphons, cream whizzers and fondues.

Tea always, always came out of a pot and tasted better for it, but cheese often tasted of so little that the biscuits it was served with had to be cheese "flavoured" too. At Christmas cheese was sometimes red. This exotic so-called "red Leicester" tasted the same as the yellow stuff but was more festive.

One of the worst and best problems about Christmas is that there is never really time to get properly hungry before I've eaten something else. We ate a lot less in the 1970s, so everything tasted that bit nicer anyway. I have a fold-up picnic table and chairs set that we used to take on picnics. It's alarming, but placing the largest member of the Starbucks coffee family in the middle of the table would probably cause it to collapse. Just by looking at that wobbly little set-up you can tell how much less people weighed, and how much less food went on the table in the recent past.

Ironically, back then we would boast to each other about how heavy our turkeys were. "Ours is over three hundredweight and we've had to saw it in half to fit it in the oven." Over the past couple of years it has been crucial to be able to declare something tiny. "Well, we've always had goose, but this year we're having grouse." "Mmmm. Absolutely. Yes, we're all having mouse, actually, this year."

Is a presentation case of fun-size Green & Blacks bars really nicer than a box of bottle-shaped miniature chocolate liqueurs? Who can say? Does food actually improve as we career headlong into the mists of the future, or does it just change? It certainly never gets boring. OFM