The trend originated with one woman saying bread and cheese was her ideal meal. Oliva Maher then created a TikTok video sharing her "girl dinner," and showed a whole counter (not a snack plate — an entire counter) with a spread of cheese, bread and fruit, and a glass of red wine. Like a nice grass fire, the girl dinner idea quickly spread. Others wanted to touch that hotness and showed off their own girl dinners. The concept even got an official jingle.
Over the past couple of weeks, many other girls on TikTok have shared videos of their own ideal meals: baked cheese and pickles, nachos with ranch, pasta with olive oil and Parmesan or just pickles. One girl just took a nap instead of making anything at all. The short videos are racking up millions of views.
The spirit of girl dinner is eating what you want, and sometimes that means keeping it easy, possibly because of long-established gender roles: Meals that are less work have more appeal for the people likely stuck making them.
Perhaps the most empowering girl dinner comes from PillowBruja. Her girl dinner was Plan B (the "morning-after" pill), Pepsi and peanut M&Ms (sharing size, but likely not actually to share). PillowBruja might be the girl dinner mascot.
@pillowbruja Here for the D, by D i mean Dinner #GirlDinner ♬ original sound - karma carr
Popeye's quickly cartwheeled onto the scene by rolling out an actual girl dinner menu that is nothing but sides. Macaroni and cheese, Cajun fries, biscuits, cole slaw and red beans and rice. We prefer Zoli's girl dinner: a pizza box full of one of everything on the menu. Zoli's gets us.
And as much as it made me cringe at first when I saw the headline with "Girl Dinner" — my first thought being, 'Why can't we just eat?' — it's simply what Oliva Maher called it, her personal term, and others followed suit sharing their own girl dinners.
It was other publications, like Bon Appetit, that ran with the snack plate storyline: "Chill, ‘Girl Dinner’ Is Literally Just a Snack Plate." Actually, that was Maher's ideal meal, which wasn't even on a plate; it was spread over her kitchen counter. Then more rewrites of the story morphed the concept into eating light, which is where the real gender roles fell into line by the very people trying to call out the gender assignments. Some even go so far as to call it a dangerous trend. Big fat sigh.
Larissa Werhnyak, head of the American studies program and senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas sees good in the girl dinner trend. Instead of the old expectations of finding fulfillment in domesticity for others, they're finding it alone.
"This seems especially important since "aloneness" is so often cast as failed femininity," Werhnyak wrote in an email to the Observer. "For example, the negative ideal of the sad, dowdy, chronically-single cat lady, eating Ritz crackers and cream cheese over her kitchen sink for dinner."
Further, Werhnyak says, there's no underlying subtext of guilt, shame, or having first to sacrifice in order to "deserve" something for oneself.
"It also doesn't seem to invite a lot of fuss or one-up-manship (womanship?) and therefore seems to hold the potential for women to find a small sense of community and shared experience via posts, views and likes," Werhnyak says.
