Slices of cheese, various fruits, pickles, cured meats and an extensive amount of bread. It sounds like the afternoon snack of a medieval squire. This miscellaneous motley of foods as a meal just happens to be equally appealing to the modern, liberated woman.
“Girl dinner,” one of the more widespread TikTok trends that started over the summer, seems to simply be an incarnation of a charcuterie board or a holiday snack tray. With women from around the globe sharing a love for meals consisting of incohesive, rich snack foods, there is no one picture of what exactly a “girl dinner” is.
What does remain consistent throughout each short video documenting a “girl dinner” is it exists completely for one person. Where women have been expected for years to make aesthetically pleasing Super Bowl party platters or Christmas meat-and-cheese trays for their families and guests, “girl dinners” are completely autonomous.
Olivia Maher, original creator of the “girl dinner” trend, spoke with the New York Times in July about exactly this facet of the trend. “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.
Women are often so used to feeling like every meal they make has to be beautiful, well-rounded and uniform, that something as small as making a meal that is completely your own can be a small act of freedom.
A “girl dinner” means eating as much of whatever is desired, no matter how odd it looks. It means not worrying about how perfect the roasted chicken looks that took all day to make, because they can just eat the olives, guacamole, baguette and Olive Garden leftovers like they wanted to anyway.
The trend is just for fun, it began as one woman’s way to joke about her odd, unbalanced meal. But in these videos is something a bit deeper: the act of women coming together to share something in common that they do only for themselves is something to be celebrated.
Food is not just for survival. Food can be a passion, a way to express oneself. It can also just be something to enjoy. Women are often stripped of things that are only for themselves, often trying to meet expectations of how they should be eating and who they are preparing meals for.
The small acts of girlhood that women share with one another should be celebrated.
As Gwen Stefani iconically sang in No Doubt’s 1995 single “Just a Girl,” “I can’t do the little things I hold so dear / ‘Cause it’s all those little things that I fear.” Women can often become so worried about doing everything perfectly, they can forget to do things for themselves.
So, although it is recommended to eat a balanced meal with family whenever possible, keep doing “girl dinner” and other small things without worrying about others. When women are expected to be perfect every second, there is a small revolution in doing whatever they want, even if it seems a bit silly.
