\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 90 degrees outside, and you\u2019re too hot and exhausted from a long day of work to cobble together a proper meal. Luckily you\u2019re home by yourself \u2014 no kids, no roommates, no partners \u2014 and therefore can eat whatever you want for dinner, without having to consider the food preferences or nutrition needs of others. You grab a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, some cheese and a hunk of chocolate, and settle into the couch for a night of snacking and watching TV. Is there anything more glorious? Welcome to \u201cgirl dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to TikTok, where the trend has more than 30 million views<\/a>, girl dinner is akin to an aesthetically pleasing Lunchable: an artfully arranged pile of snacks that, when consumed in high enough volume, constitutes a meal. Or so the thinking goes.<\/p>\n Typical girl dinners may include some kind of fruit, a block of cheddar, sliced salami, a sleeve of fancy crackers and a dish of olives. Girl dinner is \u201cboth chaotic and filling,\u201d as one TikTok commenter put it<\/a>, requiring none of the forethought, cooking or plating demanded by an actual meal. As another commenter observed: It\u2019s \u201cno preparation just vibes.\u201d<\/p>\n The trend started when Olivia Maher, a showrunner\u2019s assistant currently out of work because of the writers\u2019 strike, posted a video on TikTok this spring extolling the virtues of a humble, medieval-peasant-inspired assemblage that she called \u201cgirl dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI think the concept of girl dinner came to me while I was on a hot girl walk<\/a> with another female friend of mine,\u201d Ms. Maher, 28, said <\/em>from her apartment in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n She said she and her friend had been discussing the unmatched perfection of bread and cheese as a meal unto itself, as simple as it is satisfying. \u201cWe love eating that way, and it feels like such a girl dinner because we do it when our boyfriends aren\u2019t around and we don\u2019t have to have what\u2019s a \u2018typical dinner\u2019 \u2014 essentially, with a protein and a veggie and a starch,\u201d Ms. Maher said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She decided to debut the phrase on TikTok. \u201cThis is my dinner,\u201d Ms. Maher says in the video<\/a>, flipping her phone camera to display her spread: hunks of butter and cheese, part of a baguette, some grapes and pickles, and a glass of red wine. \u201cI call this girl dinner.\u201d Since she posted it in May, the 15-second clip has been watched more than a million times.<\/p>\n Alana Laverty, a 28-year-old food content creator in London who immediately embraced the phrase, said she started making what she called \u201csnack plates\u201d for dinner during summers when it was too hot to even consider turning on a stove.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI feel like cooking full meals just gets so repetitive and exhausting, especially in the summer,\u201d Ms. Laverty said. \u201cWhen dinner came around, we would just pick up one main cheese or one main protein and get a fresh loaf of bread and throw it all on the plate. It\u2019s a really normal way of eating for me now.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Laverty started posting her beautifully arranged snack plates on TikTok last year. When the girl dinner trend began to take off, she recalled, \u201cI was like, \u2018I have never resonated with something more.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere was this feeling of, \u2018Oh my God, I\u2019m not the only one,\u2019\u201d Ms. Laverty said. \u201cI love anything that celebrates something women are all doing, but we don\u2019t all know that we\u2019re doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Some have pointed out<\/a> that the grazing isn\u2019t enough satisfy their own appetites and, in some cases, could be masking disordered eating.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Girl dinner\u2019 more like girl please go to the doctor you have an ED,\u201d one user wrote on TikTok<\/a>.<\/p>\n But adherents are quick to note that girl dinners are not about deprivation. Women have long been programmed to see food as the enemy, but the girl dinner trend is about embracing the simple joy of snacks as meals. Girl dinner represents a conscious choice to opt out of the tyranny of cooking and doing the dishes. It\u2019s also, conveniently, the answer to fridge clean out day.<\/p>\n And though the trend may sound suspiciously like tapas, or mezze, or a charcuterie board, girl dinner differs in one key way: Unlike a Super Bowl-esque spread of appetizers, girl dinner is most frequently made by one person, for the consumption and enjoyment of one person.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI remember trying to be a meal prepper and I just couldn\u2019t do it,\u201d Ms. Laverty said. \u201cYou could go through the effort of it, but why not open up a bunch of jars and satisfy your taste senses the same way?\u201d<\/p>\n Seema Rao, an art historian in Cleveland, sees a historical connection between girl dinner and entrenched gender norms that dictate women prepare a hearty meal for their husbands every evening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe idea of cooking dinner was historically women\u2019s work in the home,\u201d said Ms. Rao, 49. \u201cWhat I like about girl dinner is it takes away the idea that you have to cook anything: You just literally put it together. So you go from a position where the production of the food is what makes it good and makes you a valid woman, to the idea that having<\/em> food is what makes you a valid woman.\u201d<\/p>\n At least one nutritionist has given her seal of approval<\/a> to the trend. Kathrine Kofoed, 27, a nutritionist and health coach in Portland, Ore., suggested that part of the reason girl dinner was being so widely embraced was its affirmation of the way women already eat: \u201cIt\u2019s a pleasant departure from diet culture, and from all these rigid expectations of what food should be.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI see so many more issues for people with overeating and restricting and then perhaps bingeing, or just having this very complicated and often disordered relationship with food,\u201d Ms. Kofoed said, pointing to the benefits of finding \u201cmore joy and pleasure in the meals we\u2019re eating.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Perhaps the most important thing about girl dinner is that you don\u2019t have to be a girl to enjoy it.<\/p>\n \u201cMy friends and I were joking that it\u2019s girl dinner, but anyone can have it,\u201d Ms. Maher said. \u201cBut it\u2019s for the girls, gays and theys.\u201d<\/p>\n You may be wondering what, by contrast, \u201cboy dinner\u201d may look like. \u201cGo to your local supermarket at 6:30 p.m. and stand behind a single man and see what\u2019s inside of his basket,\u201d the comedian Brian Lee observed<\/a> on TikTok. \u201cFrozen pizza, deli meats, potato chips, no vegetables.\u201d<\/p>\n For Ms. Maher, it\u2019s less about the content of the meal than the feeling around it. \u201cThe girl dinner is a giddy experience,\u201d she said. \u201cYou could be having the slice of frozen pizza, but you\u2019ve also got maybe a glass of wine and some grapes to go with it. And you\u2019re just so pleased with yourself. You\u2019re like, \u2018I barely worked for this and it feels like an indulgence.\u2019 That\u2019s what makes it girl dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n