It’s Girl Dinner Summer, in case you didn’t get the memo on TikTok, where it was born and is now circulating on other social channels and in mainstream media.
The phenomenon of the Girl Dinner has gone through a full evolutionary cycle – a whole journey, if you will – since it launched in May. It started, as so many viral things do, as an offhand joke by a clever creator when Olivia Maher shared a video of her dinner, an assemblage of bread and cheese and grapes and cornichons, calling it something a medieval peasant might have eaten.
Other users, mostly young women, chimed in with their own iterations of the Girl Dinner, mostly charcuterie-adjacent collections of snacky little bits that they might pull out of their fridges and cupboards when there’s no one else around. The look was often curated, at least vaguely, with hunks of picturesque salami and cheese slices arrayed on plates and boards (yes, we’re still putting everything on boards).
Girl Dinner 2.0? Tatiana Yashina/Shutterstock
But the trend didn’t remain static; people quickly got real about their solo spreads, and the Girl Dinner started unraveling. Instead of composed, photogenic arrangements, the current spate of Girl Dinners are unhinged. There’s ramen, of course. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dipped in something that looks like sour cream? Just a bunch of pickles? A can of corn? It’s all Girl Dinner, sometimes set to a discordant jingle that’s simply “Girrrrl dinner, girrl dinner, girrrrrl dinnnner.”
“Girl Dinner can be cute, but I like the creative weirdo dinners,” writer and chef Klancy Miller says. Miller wrote an entire book about the joy that single diners can find in the kitchen (“Cooking Solo: The Fun of Cooking for Yourself”), but even she admits that there are moments when a person just … can’t.
“It’s hilarious to see the iterations,” she says. “It’s like, who’s got time for aesthetics all the time – even in this TikTok/Instagram world? Sometimes it’s just Doritos.”
The gendered aspect of the Girl Dinner was put into high relief when its spawn began emerging. Boy Dinner is a more protein-forward affair. There’s Husband Meal, which apparently consists of foods that would appall the wife were she home. And cold chicken nuggets the kids didn’t eat is a feature of Mom Dinner.
Emily Contois, a media studies professor at the University of Tulsa who studies food and gender, likes the pure idea of Girl Dinner – that women can be freed by the expectation of society to nurture and provide for others, that they can enjoy the kind of self-indulgent “you do you” eating that men have long felt entitled to. “Especially in the early videos, there’s this lovely connection among women, this sort of like happy, open-mouthed grin of recognition and understanding a sort of camaraderie,” she says.
But the term might not be as innocent as it seems, she says – after all, we’re not living in the utopia of Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland. “Outside the patriarchy, ‘girl’ isn’t diminutive or derisive or condescending – ‘girl’ is complete and wonderful and fulfilled on her own terms,” Contois says. “But we are not in that place, right? Like we were in a moment where in the United States women have fewer rights over their bodies than they’ve had for a really long time.”
As the Girl Dinner continued its march, inevitably, there was hand-wringing, as there so often is whenever the eating habits of women are examined. People worried that the Girl Dinners weren’t healthy enough, that they were merely a cute label for disordered eating (and in some instances, women did seem to use the hashtag to flex how little they eat, showing only a can of Diet Coke or a glass of ice cubes as their meal.) “Are the Girl Dinner Girls all right?” the world seemed to be asking. My inbox was filled with pitches for dietitians eager to comment.
There were attempts at corporate co-opting, the most egregious of which was when Popeye’s introduced its “Girl Dinner Menu” that consisted of nothing but sides. More emails arrived from food companies hawking their own Girl Dinner accoutrements.
Girl Dinner back in the day: Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City confessed she sometimes ate a stack of saltines with jelly when alone. Danny Smythe/Shutterstock.
The Girl Dinner’s complicated trajectory played out so quickly, it left some of us just gaping as it merrily chugged past, our mouths barely having time to form the words: But, wait, haven’t we been doing this all along? Before the Girl Dinner had a name, a decade ago, there was Olivia Pope, the fictional Washington “fixer” of the late ABC drama “Scandal,” savoring her iconic bowl of popcorn and massive crystal glass of red wine from her ivory sofa. In the early aughts, there was Carrie Bradshaw, the ur-single girl from “Sex and the City” eating a stack of saltines with grape jelly in the episode where the friends confess their “secret single behavior.”
Girl dinners have always existed; they are merely what we eat when we’re alone – whatever it is, however strange or unsustaining. It’s what we eat, for whatever reason, whether it’s because we just … can’t, or because we finally can – because, in Carrie Bradshaw’s words, “it just feels great.” But it seems that the desire to brand something, to “romanticize our lives,” is strong in the culture of social media.
“People have been doing this as long as there have been cheese and crackers,” Miller says. “And before. I think the fun of it is that it’s silly.”
The whole Girl Dinner discourse, though, seems to make Anita Lo a little sad. For one, the New York chef and author of “Solo: a Modern Cookbook for a Party of One” says it’s ridiculous to gender eating. “I’m sorry, women don’t like to eat a big piece of steak? Or there aren’t vegan men? Please.”
And most of all, so many of the Girl Dinners – well, they strike her as awful. Lo likes a real meal for dinner – even a salad, she says, doesn’t feel satisfying. “I don’t like to judge what other people are eating,” she says. “But you are what you eat, so you should make it nice.”
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