There is an idea worth defending in "girl dinner"

It bums me out that we’ve lost the not-serious fun part of the concept                   [View on web]( TikTok creator Alana Laverty’s neatly organized snack plate shows how enticing and moldable the concept of "girl dinner" can be | [Alana Laverty/TikTok]( There is a sense of foreboding that comes with seeing something you liked on TikTok escape to other platforms. By virtue of their different audiences, the tenor and the reception quickly change — often for the worse. Videos that were largely understood as jokes by the TikTok crowd are perceived by users less familiar with the platform and its humor as deathly serious, often with the lens of Millennial gawkers who want any reason to diss Gen Z. This is how I feel about “girl dinner” and the ways it has metastasized in the public conversation. To recap: Olivia Maher, a showrunner’s assistant, is credited with the trend. In a [video posted in May](, Maher shows a spread of butter, cheese, pickles, and fruit. Maher mentions a different creator comparing that kind of meal to the food of a medieval peasant, but Maher owns it by saying, “I call this girl dinner.” It was [creator Alana Laverty’s]( composed snack plates featuring neatly plated stripes of salami, olives, burrata, and bread that really clicked with me though. With time, the concept expanded into more feral forms, like sandwiches eaten over the sink or large amounts of pickles. Clearly, “girl dinner” was this moldable, free thing, and in the beginning, when it existed primarily on TikTok, “girl dinner” was lighthearted fun. To be clear, many cultures eat this way — tapas in Barcelona, meze in Beirut, and apéro in Paris, for example — but “girl dinner” was just a flippant phrase for something familiar. It was a way of romanticizing — to borrow the term du jour — the mundane of everyday eating. It created a sense of being in on a niche joke (“[the girls who get it, get it](”). And in aesthetic versions like Laverty’s, it created a pleasant shorthand for the idea of feeding yourself as you might treat cooking for someone else. Maher [told the New York Times in July]( that the snack plate meal “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.’” I liked the way the concept extended. The zucchini fritters that I reserve for when my zucchini-hating fiancé is doing his own thing? “Girl dinner.” When I make the effort to dredge and fry chicken cutlets for a solo meal, which I eat with a fun glass of wine? Also, to me, “girl dinner.” I’d long appreciated this kind of meal — the one made thoughtfully for just myself as a way to diverge from my regular, partnered routine. No one meal is “girl dinner” nor is “girl dinner” a prescriptive thing since “girl dinner” depends on the girl. (For that matter, I see this all as gender-neutral; being a girlie is a state of mind). But then “girl dinner” entered the bigger internet, where naysayers [poo-pooed its]( emphasis on curation and aesthetics or linked it to the patriarchy. They scrutinized its nutritional value, calling it “[problematic](” and tying it to disordered eating. They deemed the terminology “[infantilizing](,” and asked why we must gender our food. They [claimed]( it made a “spectacle out of women eating,” signaling “a lack of critical thinking.” In all of this, it’s clear we don’t all mean the same thing when we think of “girl dinner,” and I fear we’ve lost the plot on what made the trend so appealing in the first place. There is an idea worth defending at the heart of “girl dinner”: individualized pleasure. These meals are eaten alone, guided by singular cravings, and often consumed without caring about being perceived. These meals are all the more special for those of us who spend most of our culinary efforts cooking for other people, thus keeping the needs, preferences, and cravings of others top of mind. This is gendered labor, perhaps prompting this tongue-in-cheek gendered solution. To prove how silly all this hand-wringing about “girl dinner” really is, “husband meal,” [as GQ coined](, centers around the exact same theme: Those of us who tend to eat with others simply want a fun way to think about eating alone, however feral or photograph-ready the meal may be. — Bettina Makalintal, senior reporter If you like this email, please forward it to a friend. If you aren't signed up for this newsletter, you can [do so right here](.  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=today). View our [Privacy Notice]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 11, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.