Girl Dinner isn't the feminist proclamation of food it once was..

{Trigger Warning for talks on disordered eating}

If you're anywhere near as active on TikTok as I am, you've probably heard the sound ✨Girl Dinner✨. It's usually followed by a mix of random ingredients women put together within seconds, and call this new phenomenon.

It's fun, we all can't be bothered to cook every now and again (most days), and most importantly, it's easy as hell...

I mean, I see the appeal

Buuut, as many, it seems there are deeper roots to the trend,

It seems like a nice reclamation of dinner, as all throughout history, women have been the ones spending hours on dinner. We've been expected to cook, clean, and make sure everything's perfect for our nuclear husband in our nuclear families...

If yk, yk 💔

So for once, we don't have to spend hours preparing dinner like our ancestors did, we can have a quick, easy and enjoyable meal without any prep time at all, and hardly and washing up to do afterwards.

It sounds ideal.

Many hopped on this trend, the original video by Olivia Maher receiving over 1 billion views and soon women around the world were showing their girl dinners, from literal popcorn only to chicken nuggets and an elf bar.

Ya see where the 'but' is coming from?

Image from here

Is it Girl Dinner or malnutrition?

After scrolling through the sound for a while, you start to notice, a lot of the videos popping up aren't showing much food at all, and you start to wonder how much of it actually sufficient for an (at least) suitable diet.

Now I'm not talking eat your greens, I'm talking about genuinely having sufficient food and not underfeeding your body.

A lot of the videos don't portray a healthy amount of food, and many substitute some foods with either a vape or cigarette, as they are appetite suppressants...

What originally started as simply piecing together random foods to create ✨Girl Dinner✨, quickly changed to, what some think, a glorification of underfeeding your body. A portrayal of unhealthily feeding your body and not giving it what it needs.

The debate sparked multiple creators to come out on TikTok and say what they think;

Alex Carr with @theSkimm believes that "we don't care what it's called, as long as you enjoy it" whereas influencer Halley implied it was related to disordered eating, "I think that's called something else"

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic, are we glorifying disordered eating, or simply rebelling against sexist norms?

-M:)