Finally, We’re Talking About The Joy Of ‘Girl Dinner’

What’s on your #girldinner menu?

Can we acknowledge the mental load - and time consumed - coming up with and cooking a ‘proper’ dinner each night? Especially when you’ve been working all day, commuted or been undertaking caring duties. Often it can feel like yet another thing to have to do in a long day of demands, not to mention the pressure to keep things interesting when you’ve exhausted every cuisine you can think of (and Taco Tuesdays roll around so damn fast).

When we saw #girldinner trending online, at first we were sceptical, wondering what unattainable fad was about to be attributed to women, until we saw the content.

A hunk of cheese, a splash of red wine, a giant bunch of grapes, some slices of baguette, a jar of pickles. TikToker Livie Maher shared this hodgepodge spread of an evening meal in response to another who had admitted that eating only bread and cheese “like a medieval peasant” was her idea of food heaven.

via TikTok @liviemaher

Girl dinner is the unspoken habit we all do when we have a night to ourselves and feel zero expectation to come up with a semblance of a real meal. Girl dinner has no set menu or prescribed rules, nor does it have to be as perfectly styled as the #butterboard trend that came before it. That’s the fun of it. It’s a raid of the fridge for leftovers, mixed with a dip into a jar of antipasto. Some toast with hummus teamed with baby cheeses, carrot and cucumber sticks, followed by ice cream. A choose your own adventure type of feed.

One enjoyer of the girl dinner observed that the rest of the world is just cottoning on to the way that most Germans eat dinner – a mix of ‘picky bits’.

Some evenings we only have the capacity to heat up some pasta and sprinkle it with cheese. Nobody’s recommending that particular dish as an everyday occurrence since it lacks the nutrients our bodies need, but an occasional easy win isn’t the end of the world.

Can we admit that for some, cooking does not bring joy? We have other priorities in our few hours to ourselves. If you can fill your plate with variety, including protein, fibre, fruit and veggies, girl dinner once in a while can be unproblematic.

via TikTok @kathrinekofoed

Sadly, as with all things, some have misread the assignment, interpreting #girldinner as dangerously under-eating or skipping dinner. Not only unhealthy, this is missing the point. And frankly, missing the joy.

Girl dinner is not about eating less, nor toxic diet culture. It’s about the pure happiness that eating all your favourite individual bits brings, without someone looking over your shoulder and asking, “but isn’t it Taco Tuesday?”

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