Girl dinner: what’s the girl dinner TikTok fad – 07/16/2023 – Food

It’s 32 degrees outside, you’re too hot and tired after a long day at work to cook a “real” meal. Luckily, she’s home alone — no kids, no partner, no roommates — so she can eat whatever she wants for dinner, without having to consider anyone else’s preferences or nutritional needs.

You grab a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, cheese and a piece of chocolate and settle down on the couch to spend a few hours snacking and watching TV. Is there anything better than this? Welcome to the “girl dinner”.

According to TikTok, where the trend has already attracted more than 30 million views, the “girl dinner” is something that can be compared to an aesthetically pleasing snack: various edibles arranged on a plate in a visually appealing way and that, when consumed in volume enough, constitute a meal. Or at least that’s the idea.

A typical “girl dinner” might include some sort of fruit, a chunk of cheddar, sliced ​​salami, yummy cream crackers, and a little plate of olives. The dish is “both chaotic and filling,” according to a comment on TikTok, and doesn’t require the work of thinking ahead about ingredients, cooking, and arranging the food on the plate, as is the case with an actual meal. Or, as another commentator put it: “there’s no preparation, just vibes”.

The trend started a few months ago when Olivia Maher, an assistant showrunner who is currently unemployed due to the writers’ strike, posted a video on TikTok praising the advantages of a simple montage, inspired by the diet of medieval peasants, which she dubbed “girl dinner”.

“I think the concept of a ‘girl dinner’ came to me during a walk I was taking with a friend,” said Maher, 28, speaking from her Los Angeles apartment.

She and her friend were talking about the unique perfection of bread and cheese as a meal in its own right, as simple as it is satisfying. “We love to eat this way, and it feels so girly because we do it when our boyfriends aren’t around and we don’t have to worry about making a ‘normal dinner’ – basically one that includes a protein, a vegetable and a base. , like rice or potatoes.”

She decided to debut the phrase on TikTok. “This is my dinner,” says Maher in the video, turning his phone’s camera to show his plate: slices of bread and cheese, part of a baguette, some grapes, pickles and a glass of red wine. “I call it a girl dinner.” Since she posted the 15-second video in May, the clip has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Alanna Laverty, 28, a London-based food content creator, jumped on the bandwagon immediately and said she started making what she described as “plates of snacks” for dinner in the summer when it was too hot to even think about lighting the stove.

“Cooking a full meal becomes repetitive and exhausting, especially in the summer,” she said. “At dinner time, we would take a main cheese to be our main protein, look for a fresh bread and put everything on the plate. Today this is a way of eating that is very common for me.”

Laverty started posting her beautifully arranged snack plates on TikTok last year. When the girl dinner trend started to take off, she said, “I thought, ‘I’ve never identified with anything so much before.’

“It was that ‘Oh my God, I’m not the only one,’ feeling,” she said. “I love anything that celebrates something that all women are doing, but we don’t know we’re all doing it.”

Some people have commented that snacking is not enough to satisfy their appetite and that, in some cases, this may be masking an eating disorder.

“‘Girl dinner’ might actually be ‘girl please see a doctor because you have an eating disorder,'” wrote one user on TikTok.

But people who have jumped on the bandwagon point out that “girl dinners” aren’t about depriving yourself of anything. Women have long been programmed to view food as the enemy, but the trend is to embrace the simple pleasure of snacking as a meal. The “girl dinner” represents a conscious choice to opt out of the tyranny of cooking and washing dishes. And it’s also a practical way to get rid of leftovers that you may have in the fridge.

At least one nutritionist has already indicated that she approves of the trend. Kathrine Kofoed, 27, a nutritionist and health coach from Portland, Ore., suggested that part of the reason the “girl dinner” is being so well received is that it reaffirms the way women already eat. “It’s a nice alternative to diet culture and all these rigid expectations of what food should be.”

“I find it much more problematic for people who overeat and then limit themselves, in periodic binge eating, or those who simply have a very complicated and disordered relationship with food,” said Kofoed. She pointed to the benefits of “getting more joy and pleasure from the food we eat.”