The International "Trend" in fine food in the 1970s and 1980s was nouvelle cuisine.

The term was created by Henri Gault, the food critic and originator of the Gault-Millau Guide (a competitor to the Michelin Guide as a guide to restaurants). He first used the term to describe the food prepared by Paul Bocuse and other famous chefs for the first flight of the Concorde in 1969.

Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guerard, Roger Verge, and Raymond Oliver, many of whom had once been students of Fernand Pont, were the most famous chefs who spread the nouvelle cuisine.

According to Gault and Millau, there were ten characteristics involved in the "formula" for nouvelle cuisine:

A rejection of excessive complication in cooking.

Cooking times for most fish, seafood, game birds, veal, green vegetables and pâtés were greatly reduced in an attempt to preserve the natural flavors. Steaming was an important trend from this characteristic.

The cuisine was made with the freshest possible ingredients.

Large menus were abandoned in favor of shorter menus.

Strong marinades for meat and game ceased to be used.

They stopped using heavy sauces such as espagnole and béchamel in favor of seasoning their dishes with fresh herbs, high quality butter, lemon juice, and vinegar.

They used regional dishes for inspiration instead of cuisine classique dishes.

New techniques were embraced and modern equipment was often used; Bocuse even used microwave ovens.

The chefs paid close attention to the dietary needs of their guests through their dishes.

The chefs were extremely inventive and created new combinations and pairings.

I'm sure that nouvelle cuisine impacted on the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, but I'm not familiar with that history.

Perhaps someone else will add more?

This is a really interesting question that I wish I could answer, because the trends behind cuisine, food writing, and thought on the subject have changed radically in the U.S. since the period you describe. Moreover, you're completely right that politics and food often intersect in surprising ways; culture warriors have argued that a lot of the bitching about convenience food culture in the United States is basically a veiled criticism of women for leaving the kitchen in droves when they had the opportunity to do so. (Disclaimer: I'm not linking the article as an unthinking endorsement of its premise, because this is an incredibly complicated subject -- just observing that these fights are happening.)

Another disclaimer: This is a hobby field for me, so I think the best I can do is point you to a few sources and generalize superficially on comments they've made. It's somewhat difficult to study food in North Korea because often they don't have any.

Food critics who have been active in the business for a few decades may be your best source of information on this from both a historical and historiographical perspective (i.e., their commentary on developments in cuisine and what they themselves were personally inclined to review). I know of three who have directly or indirectly commented on the subject you raise here:

• Jane and Michael Stern, the couple behind Roadfood: They started criss-crossing the United States and writing about local restaurants and regional cuisine in the mid-1970s. Their initial intent was to create a national guidebook of quality restaurants for people who were traveling, but things didn't go as they'd planned. The Sterns argued that the interstate highway system had already had a depressive effect on regional cuisine; people traveling long distances rarely went far off the highways, and they were often most interested in food with which they were already familiar. So rather than, say, the fried brain sandwich of St. Louis or the upper peninsula pasty of Michigan or Rocky Mountain oysters (i.e., fried testicles) of the West, long-distance travelers usually sought hamburgers and hot dogs and pizza. The Sterns not only wanted to capture the more interesting regional food of the States, they also wanted to point out the significant variation that existed in otherwise "national" dishes, e.g., the onion burgers of Oklahoma vs. the butter burgers of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Coneys of Rhode Island vs. the garden dogs of Chicago, and things like white clam pizza in Connecticut. Consequently they did most of their exploring on smaller routes rather than the interstates.

I have the 1983 edition of Goodfood, the 2001 reprint of Square Meals (originally published 1984), and the 1986 Real American Food. Out of these, the latter two would probably be the best places to start, because they're really chronicles of regional food and 1950s-1980s American foodways than they are cookbooks. Square Meals contains accounts of tiki culture (already on the decline when the Sterns started Roadfood in the 70's), Victory gardens, and the rise of convenience food in the post-WWII period, much of which had been driven by advances in food preservation and packaging during the war. Real American Food is more about regional food driven by patterns of immigrant migration, although it also contains bits on the health food revolution in California, "meat and three" in the South, the different varieties of diner, and Native American cooking.

With respect to your question here, in their autobiographical Two for the Road, they describe trendy restaurant cuisine in the 1970's U.S. as being "creamed snails, sick-looking liver pâtés, cheese that smelled like feet, and odd organs from inside unusual animals." Given the increasing influence of French cuisine in the U.S. both before and during this period (see below), this description is likely plausible.

• Ruth Reichl, the restaurant critic at the New York Times between 1993 and 1999: She wrote Garlic and Sapphires about the New York period in her life and commented that the Times had traditionally paid little attention to anything that wasn't a ritzy French or Italian restaurant. The newspaper received complaint letters when she reviewed Thai, Korean, or Arabic restaurants (among others); these cuisines were not perceived to be as prestigious or relevant.

Other disjointed thoughts, and I am not an expert so this is by no means comprehensive:

• Something that deserves mention here on an historical note is the slow build-up to cultural change. For lack of a better way to put this, by the time we recognize that something's happening, it's already happened. When we talk about a successful movement that was "founded" in, say, 1977, what we're saying is that the conditions necessary to create and sustain that movement were building in the years or even decades prior to 1977, and that often means that earlier influences existed but may not be as high-profile. With respect to Reichl's comment earlier, it is probably true that classic French cooking was more valued by the predominantly middle to upper class readership of the New York Times in the early 1990s (most of whom would have grown up in the 1960s or earlier); however, it's also true that Reichl was herself a product of the new California cuisine movement and was able to reach people in the NYC food community who had felt excluded by the newspaper's traditional indifference to "ethnic" cuisine.
• Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first published in 1961, and The French Chef debuted on television at 1963. Julia Child's work was the means by which many Americans were introduced to French cuisine.
• The nouvelle cuisine movement in France dates to the 1960s and had a significant impact on the perception of food presentation that arguably continues to this day.
• Alice Waters' Chez Panisse (local sourcing, organic ingredients) was opened in 1971 and remains successful to this day. She later become an influential person in the Slow Food movement (see below).
• Jacques Pepin's La Technique was first published in 1976. Like Child, Pepin later became a popular TV chef.
• The Slow Food movement was formally founded in 1986 Italy but attracted widespread support within the American food establishment.
• The Food Network launched in the U.S. in 1993 (the same year that Reichl started reviewing at the Times).

Anyway! Really fascinating question, and if you have access to a library or just a few bucks to toss at Amazon, I'd really recommend starting with the Sterns. They were (and are) incredibly prolific and just plain fun to read.

You could try to ask on /r/KitchenConfidential. This is not a serious subreddit but if they're not all dead from exhaustion there are probably a few people there that would have some insider knowledge on that question.

It's not directly what you're asking about, but you might want to check out a 6-pt UK programme called Back in Time For Dinner. It takes a regular British family and puts them back in the 1950's and views their life and culture through the medium of food and the effect it has on the family. Each episode focuses on a specific decade (every day they move forward a year), and the changes they focus on and the ripples to and from the dinner table are pretty interesting. I don't buy the whole thing and the dad in particular can be annoying in trying to relate, but there were parts that were really interesting.

There was a trend of using itty bitty samples of food on a big plate, was very popular in the 1980s.

My parents tell me a story of them taking their 7 foot tall ex-semi-professional basketball player family friend out for a fancy dinner and it was a 6 plate meal of the itty bitty portions.

He ended up walking out and ordering 2 extra-large pizzas at a restaurant across the street and picked them up afterwards. They all ate the pizza in the car.