In July of 2023, a TikTok creator with the username @karmapilled posted a 19-second video of herself and her “girl dinner” – a single bite on the stick of a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar, being raised in the air in her house Simba-style, and with an original sound “This is my meal, I call this ‘girl dinner.’”
Two years later, the video has 23.5 million views. And, according to Forbes, the #girldinner has 1.6 billion views on TikTok.
What began with a single creator, a single video, and her single bite of a chocolate-covered ice cream bar has become a feminist, economic and eating-awareness movement both on the platform of TikTok and in real life.
The reason the video went viral and started a trend is the same reason why they all do: they are relatable.
Girl dinner is something many could easily identify with, despite the fact that what exactly “girl dinner” is is difficult to describe. The consensus is that it is an informal meal – a collection of snacks, eaten at night.
This is especially relatable for women, evidently, by the number of women using the original creator’s sound and posting their versions of “girl dinner.”
For instance, @brookiebarry, a verified creator with millions of followers, used the sound to post her “girl dinner” just a few weeks after the original video was posted – two wine glasses filled with mac and cheese and a dino chicken nugget perched on the rim of each.
Other notable videos on the platform include singer @aliciakeys’ take and @gracestamariaa’s video that earned 22.9 million views, showing two shapes of boiled pasta in a bowl, complete with olive oil, parmesan and pepper. And @katynicoleg’s video showed Popeye’s option for “Girl Dinner” on their app.
However, the trend quickly became much bigger than it started. Other creators, like @lilcecesworld explained the intersection of girl dinner and real life.
When girls who are “…addicted to Girl Dinner…” get into a relationship, “the guy is like, ‘What are we having for dinner?’…and you’re like, ‘cheese and crackers!’”
Soon after, creator @lauragouillon made a filter called “My Girl Dinner,” which randomly generated three snacks that could make up a “girl dinner.” These options included sourdough bread, pretzels, beer, chickpeas, cookies, white wine, and hamburger buns, and even some choices like olive oil, sprinkles, and salt.
However, those last options – low in calories and nutrients – seemed to be a problem for some users.
One such creator, @halleykate, earned tens of millions of views for her criticism of the trend. “…girl dinner started as this, like, funny trend, where it’s, like, random things that girls piece together and eat for dinner…Annie’s Mac and Cheese, some pretzels, and frozen mango,” she explained. “…slowly it got overtaken by, like, the wrong side of TikTok…these girls being, like, one cube of cheese ‘Girl dinner!’…no, let’s not call it that, because, I think that’s called something else.”
This led to more and more commenters taking this language and running with it. On “Girl Dinner” posts that users deemed to be insufficient in calories, the comments are flooded with the words “I think that’s called something else,” referring to an eating disorder.
However, very recently, others have continued to celebrate the still-prominent idea of girl dinner. Some even tried to translate the idea to restaurant meals, like Nolita Hall in San Diego, California.
In the last five days, @gwendolyn.g gained 3.4 million views for sharing a video with text reading “time for girl dinner (literally)” and a video of her visiting Nolita Hall, and their menu, which reads, “GIRL DINNER – Tues-Thurs – $30 – Vodka Pasta – Crisp Baby Romaine – Truffle Fries – Nitro Espresso Martini – No subs or mods – It is what it is.”
A few weeks after the original post, the creator @dr.zoe.shesacrowd argued that the subject of “girl dinner” extended to even a philosophical perspective.
“…girl dinner in the last three weeks has achieved what the feminist movement has been trying to achieve for 30 years,” the creator, who has a PhD in feminism and digital space, said. She goes on to break down the term “Girl Dinner,” first with the language of it, that it reclaims the word “girl” in a world whose vocabulary is male-centric, where words like “guys” are used as a general term for “people.”
Similar phenomena surfaced around the same time, such as the #girlmath, which offered comparable popularity, language and results.
She continues, “The digital space and the proliferation of women being able to share how they live with other women actually provides us with a strength and a solidarity because social media allows for a democratization of narratives…there’s a snowballing effect, and before you know it, we have a movement.”
Girl dinner is proof that no person, video, or bite of ice cream is too small to start conversations and shift the culture of issues far beyond themselves.
