If you’ve logged on recently, you’ve probably seen the TikTok craze machine’s latest creation: “girl dinner,” or snack plates for one. Yes, the internet has decided to rebrand my solo nights eating fruit, nuts, and honey-drizzled hunks of feta off my stomach while watching Gossip Girl reruns. The term has snowballed so out of control online that it’s putting a major dampener on the IRL activity. Unfortunately, the trendification of girl dinner—and the various controversies that have followed it—have ruined a good thing.
Basically, any assemblage of foods intended to be a full meal can be a girl dinner. The deluge of discourse started when showrunner’s assistant Olivia Maher posted a video back in May shilling the virtues of her mishmash of cheeses and bread, sparking a slew of riffs. There’s a lineup of bagel crackers, pickles, salami slices, guacamole, and strawberries. A couple of ham-and-cheese-stuffed tortillas with a glass of what looks to be Nesquik. And a very aesthetic plate of cherry tomatoes, olives, prosciutto, burrata, and plums under a shiny slick of olive oil.
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On TikTok alone, the trend has amassed over 212 million views, up from 30 million just 10 days ago. “We’re embracing low effort over overexertion,” creator Alana Laverty, who regularly shares her girl dinners online, told Dazed. “Who has time after an eight-to-10-hour workday to follow a 25-step recipe that requires 20 ingredients? Not me.” As one commenter wrote, girl dinner is freewheeling and indulgent, something of “a culinary Bacchanalia.”
At face value, girl dinner is a delightful way to nosh. “It’s perfect for the summer heat (no cooking, little cleanup) and ideal for the end of the day when you’re too exhausted to not eat foods that feel like a treat,” my colleague Sam Stone wrote about the trend. But like any viral movement, scale attracts scrutiny. In the weeks since Maher’s original post started doing the rounds, the internet has been trying to determine whether girl dinners are something to embrace or reject (things are very serious online). As we’ve witnessed time and again—please see example A: butter boards, and example B: mouse moments—once a thing is given a name, that thing becomes the object of controversy.
It needs to be said: There’s nothing new about the format. As British chef Nigella Lawson has pointed out, girl dinners are really just “picky bits.” Other creators have written entire cookbooks dedicated to the concept. You’ll see girl dinner hiding in plain sight on restaurant menus around the country: Jupiter in New York serves a bowl of cherries for dessert, and Botanica, in Los Angeles, features a bunch of dips and snacky small plates. It’s charcuterie. It’s similar to the bento-like plates—a combo of bite-size carrot medallions, cheddar cubes, grapes, and almonds—that my mom whipped up after school. Hell, it’s basically tapas, a style of eating the whole-ass country of Spain already got behind.
Some see the trend as pushback on diet culture and a solid advertisement for intuitive eating; many of the videos, posted primarily by women, show them eating whatever they feel like. Others have said that some of the “meals”—such as the clearly satirical cigarette and a cup of tea and the more, er, sparse plates floating around online—promote disordered eating. (It’s an argument unfortunately reinforced by the chosen nomenclature; girls, after all, are most at risk of developing unhealthy relationships with food.)
Others have a problem with gendering any way of eating. “That’s just a divorced dad dinner on a plate,” tweeted one user in response to a New York Times story. But Maher says that was never the point: “What matters is the feeling [girl dinner] evokes,” she told Today. “Giddiness often goes along with it, because it’s what you want. It satisfies you.” In the UK, for example, there’s nothing inherently feminine about girl dinner, which is basically a “ploughman’s lunch” and often features a spread of cold cuts, bread, cheese, and some sort of pickle.
Some people—I mean Alison Roman, specifically—reject the concept for no apparent reason. “This video you’re about to watch is in no way inspired by girl dinners,” she says, air-quoting the term in a YouTube tutorial. “This is not that; this is our version of Apero Hour.” In the YouTube caption, Roman goes on to instruct her audience that Apero Hour can be “nearly anything you like,” including “a dip, a nut, an olive, a fish, a cheese, and vegetables.” (In other words, Apero Hour is girl dinner.)
These debates are besides the point, though. 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? It’s what happened with tinned fish (that hot girls eat) and tomatoes (that “tomato girls” wear). 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. Girl dinner is dead; long live girl dinner.