Alyx, I have a feeling TikTok only exists to generate food trends, the latest of which is something called “girl dinner”. Please explain?
Personally, I prefer to use TikTok for self-diagnoses and teaching my dog to speak human, but yes, there are food videos on there. And in the last seven days more than 1,000 of those food videos (viewed a collective 14m times) have been about girl dinner: an assemblage of no-cook snacks eaten as a meal.
Cheese and bread? That’s a girl dinner. Specifically it is the ideal dinner of the woman who coined the term (and its accompanying soundbite) a few months ago: Olivia Maher.
Want to add crudites and charcuterie? Still a girl dinner. Scones, applesauce, pickles and goldfish? Yes. An icy pole? Absolutely girl dinner.
Wait – isn’t this just a cheese plate, or a ploughman’s lunch, rebranded?
Yes. Though based on my thorough sampling of the trend, cold pork pies are tragically absent from girl dinner plates. Perhaps because, as noted by many TikTok users – and over the weekend both Today and the New York Times – many of these girl dinners are “suspiciously low cal”.
“Suspiciously low cal” sounds like a spicy take on a bland meal. Are there deeper layers of social/anthropological/historical theory being projected on to this seemingly inconsequential internet trend?
But of course. Depending on which side your baguette is buttered, the girl dinner is either a site of liberation or oppression.
The pro-girl dinner faction argue that highlighting what women choose to eat when they’re alone (something that requires very little labour) serves as an antidote to both diet culture and the mental load traditionally required to get food on the table. This 2003 study that showed significant gender differences in comfort food preferences (which was assigned reading in one of my undergrad gender studies units) makes a similar case.
The girl dinner’s critics argue that actually, given how overly aestheticised and nutritionally impoverished many of the meals being shared as “girl dinner” seem to be, it is just perpetuating both diet culture and performed femininity.
after newsletter promotion
Happily, since there are as many girl dinners as there are girlies to post about them, everyone is right!
Right, so “girl dinner” is a side(salad)-bar to “hot girl food”, “white people food” and “white girl lunch” – AKA canned tuna. Is there such a thing as “boy dinner”?
According to TikToker Bryan Lee, “boy dinner” is frozen pizza, sauerkraut and potato chips. So, basically girl dinner and boy dinner are the same dinner. No one can be bothered cooking without company.
If I may, I’d like to turn this table: what’s your girl dinner take, Yvonne?
My almost-literal hot take is “hot food only in the evening” – anything that resembles a salad or a deconstructed sandwich does not qualify as dinner. A low-effort dinner for me involves a rice cooker, a cracked egg, and Knorr liquid seasoning.
Honestly, that does sound better than the “child lunch” (a half block of cheddar grated into a microwave pot of Kraft Mac and Cheese) I was planning to eat tonight. Hot!
English (US)