In the past couple of months, people have seen women sharing low-effort snack plates, charcuterie boards featuring bread, cheese, olives, pickles, nuts, and colourful fruits and vegetables on TikTok that are visually pleasing. These examples of ‘girl dinners’ are last-resort meals. Think about the times when you are so busy that you don’t have the time to cook dinner or maybe even go grocery shopping. But you are so hungry that you don’t even want to order some food and wait so long for it to be delivered. So eventually you open your fridge and fill up a plate with whatever random little bits of food you can find.
This trend began with a video posted by TikTok user Olivia Maher. And now the hashtag #girldinner alone has over 150 million views on the platform.
“A girl just came on here and said how, like, in mediaeval times, peasants had to eat nothing but bread and cheese and how awful that was – and she was like, ‘that’s my ideal meal,’” Maher said in her TikTok video. “I call this ‘girl dinner’ or ‘mediaeval peasant.’”
The girl dinner fascination took social media by storm because it highlights what women choose to eat when they’re alone. It’s preparing something that requires very little labour and not having to worry about preparing food for someone else. Therefore, it’s also about saying no to both diet culture and the mental stress that is traditionally required to put food on the table.
Olivia Maher revealed to The New York Times that the TikTok post was initially inspired by a conversation with her friend on how satisfying bread and cheese are.
“We love eating that way, and it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren’t around and we don’t have to have what’s a ‘typical dinner’ – essentially, with a protein and a veggie and a starch,” she said.
However, naturally with the trend of girl dinners comes many negative comments. This includes the fact that it could be possibly romanticising disordered eating. By portraying that it’s normal or trendy to eat a few bites for dinner, there could be a negative effect on young women and teens to eat scarcely instead of having a fulfilling meal.
TikTok user Lexie Firment commented on this saying:
“While it’s really cool to see that these girls are actually eating, they’re not eating per se enough. At least that’s my opinion. Now, I have no nutrition dietetic background, but I do come from an ED [eating disorder] background that really took a lot of my life.”
Moreover, having a small snack plate for dinner seemed to be a common concept back in the day and is a style of eating that’s been a part of cultures for centuries.
In the end, ‘girl dinner’ seems to have taken over social media and the Internet because of how relatable women find it. It’s become a way of connecting with others and saying, ‘Hey, I do that too’ or ‘I thought it was just me’.
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