Being a "thief of joy": Girl dinner and arguments against serious critique

It's not about girl dinner, not really

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CW: Brief mention of disordered eating.

This isn’t about girl dinner, not really.

The TikTok trend of eating desirable snacky bits has been covered this past month by a bunch of notable publications including The New York Times and Bon Appétit.

As the story goes, girl dinner began when one user shared her simple dinner—slices of bread with cheese, butter, grapes and wine—which she coined “girl dinner or medieval peasant.”

Since these humble beginnings, “girl dinner” (more trendy than “medieval peasant,” I guess) has come to represent many meals in many forms, from aesthetic charcuterie and aperitivo looking spreads, to Red Bull and chips, ice cream and French fries.

Girl dinner ✨discourse✨ is robust, both on the app and beyond, addressing many complicated facets of the trend in particular, as well as food trends more generally.

Of course, there are the folks who insist that girl dinner is just a rebrand of aperitivo/aperitif—or what anyone anywhere eats whenever they don’t feel like/ don’t have the time to cook a full meal.

Dietician and intuitive eating counsellor Katy Zanville speaks to some affordances of the trend, pointing out that charcuterie boards, mezze platters, or tray dinners— all of which girl dinner evokes— have been helpful meals for folks who are neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill or simply too tired to cook at the end of the day.

It’s nice to see different kinds of meals and eating habits represented and celebrated on social media! In particular, I appreciate the more accessible and flexible framing of a meal that the trend encourages. In the context of food trends on social media, it is refreshing to see a range of tasty, low effort and kinda wacky platters of food!

Dietician Abbey Sharp also reflects on the trend’s affordances, stating that girl dinner “speaks to our emotional food needs… and this does not just apply to girls.” She explains how “food is so much more than just nutrients and macros” and that any assemblage of food can form a good meal. Whether it’s called girl dinner or not, Sharp claims, is inconsequential so long as the person is eating a satiating and satisfying meal. In short, her take is that if a trend helps to normalize a more intuitive relationships to food, great!

At the same time as girl dinner defenders point to the affordances of the trend, others note the ways girl dinner, like any food trend, can be leveraged to continue promoting and/or normalizing disordered eating and diet culture.

TikTok users, like @siennabaluga , have raised legitimate concerns over how the trend has accrued many videos of paltry snacks paraded as full meals for women. A quick browse through #girldinner will procure decent spreads as well as visuals that evoke a fad diet from the 70s— hard boiled eggs, plain iceberg lettuce, cottage cheese and citrus fruits. That’s to say that “girl dinner” is not immune to diet culture’s insidious creep.

And still, there are other social media users, cultural critics and writers in the food space who have focused on how the trend speaks to issues related to domestic labour in particular, with some positing that girl dinner has been popularized as a solo meal— one that gives women, particularly those in heteronormative relationships, a break from preparing a full meal for themselves, husbands and kids— and others pointing out how that very neat reading is not nuanced enough to address the complexity of being a person who must eat.

Certainly the question “why is the bulk of domestic labor still split unevenly in partnerships, often by gender lines?,” is an important one, but it also does not adequately address the the limitations latent in the assumption that, as Alicia Kennedy puts it, peak liberation for women is freedom from domestic labour, “specifically the tyranny of the kitchen.”

“Who will take on that labour? What if we enjoy it, or aspects of it? What is the role of cultural food traditions and pleasure in a liberated world?” These are the kinds of questions that Kennedy’s reflections on domestic labour (adjacent to the topic of girl dinner) raise.

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Having taught a Popular Culture course on Food in Media and Pop Culture I’m especially interested in the way that a trend like girl dinner gathers a range of approaches and questions related to eating, such as those I’ve outlined above. Because of the sheer volume of people contributing, there is a lot to say about how girl dinner informs and/or reflects a particular moment in a culture of eating online (and offline).

When done thoughtfully, writing about trends can be an accessible entry point for a greater number of people to engage with questions related to food and gender, food and labour, food in media, etc.

But the prospect of this kind of engaging seems fraught to some (particularly, the users in the comment section of Bon Appetite’s Instagram post about the article they published on girl dinner)!

There is a general tone of frustration here that is important to acknowledge. It is true that things women and femmes like come under fire rapidly and with a rage that is easily recognized as thinly veiled misogyny and transmisogyny (case in point: men responding to the Barbie movie).

At the same time, it is also true that women’s appetites and bodies are most often the target of diet and wellness culture, and that those who are most harmed by such cultures are those who exist in bigger bodies and/or bodies that are otherwise framed as unwell or non normative. It is also true that the domestic kitchen, and the labour that happens in that space, is undervalued and feminized (especially compared to the serious work that happens in restaurant kitchens by white dude chefs).

While I acknowledge that the comment section reflects important feelings, I’m also going to say it how I see it: none of these folks actually read the article.

Sure, the title, “Chill, Girl Dinner is Literally Just a Snack Plate,” is intentionally (and probably unnecessarily) prickly. However, the content itself is pretty celebratory of the meal’s premise sprinkled with mild critiques about branding foods online. The closing lines are as follows:

But girl dinner was never meant to be this deep. It’s about making a delicious, low-effort meal. I’m happy enough to see snack platters all over the internet—of course, I prefer to see them on my lap—but they never needed a tagline. And I definitely never needed to assess the morality (or lack of) inherent in my sloppy smorgasbord.

Rather than stage an attack on girl dinner, this article is… contextualizes the term for a non TikTok audience, and posing pretty standard questions often addressed by food studies and pop culture studies: “By branding any benign food choice, the question becomes not, is it something I want to eat? But rather, is it something I align with?”

While I don’t really care for the article itself (I mean, it’s fine, whatever but I’m more interested in the conversation surrounding it) I think what’s maybe most unsettling about comments equating critique to thieving joy is the implication that a) food is not a serious topic and b) that fun, joy, and careful thinking cannot commingle, especially not in a food context.

In a post-Rapoport Bon Appétit context, when the fun space of the test kitchen was exposed as not so fun for staff of colour, this response is confusing and frustrating.

On the one hand, I can understand and empathize with the bold defence of a trend like girl dinner. It’s true that the things women like— especially young women— are commonly treated with distain and contempt. I think a lot of the defensiveness is intuitive to this. I think it is justified.

At the same time, I’m so so tired of the killjoy accusations/dismissals embedded in comments framed in these ways, which echo one’s I’ve gotten as a woman who studies food as well as its resonances in pop culture.

“That sounds fun!” “Is it that serious?” Both, and!

While girl dinner can be a fun trend, it is also true that it’s something people are resonating with and actively participating in. Why does it resonate? What does it mean to (be able to) align with a food trend like girl dinner? How are these trends instrumentalized and leveraged under capitalism? Why is it a problem to name the complicated ways that food is tied up in the world? And why can’t we have fun when something we like is very lightly critiqued?

Most of the time, we can! The fun thing can remain fun, maybe become even more fun (and for more people) in the process of careful reflection. I think this is the case for girl dinner, though I won’t be calling my snacky meals by the name.

As I tried to indicate in the opening paragraphs of this essay, there is lots to say about the trend! There are contradicting reflections. That’s fine. What is not really fine is how fun and joy are so often positioned against critique, or care for that matter, as if to imply that critique is useless, is careless, is joyless, is void of the possibility of generative outcomes.

Though it doesn’t have to be, critique can be fun and joyful (and joy-making) *cries the sad graduate student who has only ever been taught how to critique things*. Critique can be a feminist and queer practice. It so often is.

I’ve not been doing a ton of reading because I’ve been preparing for my very first pop up! If you didn’t know, I make wooden spoons spatulas and pasta boards.

I’ll be updating my online store with some remaining stock soon, if you’re looking for a sweet new cooking companion. You can also email me at melissa.a.montanari@gmail.com.