Thanks so much to everyone who responded, both in the thread I posted here and on social media, about their food traditions. I’m in the very early stages of working on a longer post (or series of posts) about the way we weave food through our traditions, and it’s super helpful to hear from all of you. And if you still want to share something, be my guest!
This week’s essay is about a tradition of sorts, too, though I had no idea until recently that it was the kind of behavior that needed to be codified and given a name (and analyzed into oblivion). But leave it to social media to dissect yet another simple, silly pleasure.
Social media has an uncanny ability to make the spotlight seem more like one of those freaky blue lights detectives shine on crime scenes to reveal blood spatter. You might at first be giddy to see your favorite under-the-radar author or the charming cafe down the block blow up on Twitter or TikTok for an internet moment. But then, often, you’ll learn something you never needed to know. The musician once fired her assistant in a fit of rage. Last month, someone found a hair in their yogurt parfait. Oh, and here’s a picture of the hair. Here’s an expert weighing in about the digestive downsides of hair consumption. Here’s another expert rebutting, claiming we should all be gnawing on follicles regularly. And now your cat’s hacking up a hairball, and the experience of breakfast at that once-beloved restaurant has gone bland.
So imagine my dismay when I learned about “girl dinner,” the latest internet food trend. Over the past few weeks, social media chatter about girl dinner has become loud enough that even I, a geriatric millennial, have become aware of it. It’s filtered all the way from TikTok to Instagram to SEO-optimized think pieces, and I ran headlong into the discourse between photos of my acquaintances’ babies.
A girl dinner is, to the best of my understanding, a plate (or napkin, or large piece of flattened waxed paper that was once used to wrap cheese) covered in an assortment of unrelated food molecules: a hunk of brie, three slices of turkey, a few berries, a fun-sized Snickers bar, two hard-boiled eggs, a yogurt, some carrots. The options are infinite and unconstrained. And kudos, I guess, to Gen Z for so definitively naming a mode of eating that so many people had already embraced for so long. (I actually named this newsletter to reflect my love of disorganized, hodgepodge eating.)
But here’s the problem: The name is terrible. It’s a little bit patronizing and a lot infantilizing, and I have to think it’s fueling the reactions. Some nutritionists say girl dinner glorifies diet culture and promotes meals that are too small and lack in nutrients. (Others say it’s a great example of intuitive eating.) The name excludes a vast swath of the population, and the fact that this a trend at all ignores the fact that the traditional American dinner — the institution girl dinner is bucking — is by no means universal. Expensive cheese and imported olives and many of the other social media trappings of girl dinner are hardly accessible to the masses.
It is possible, dear reader, to agree wholeheartedly with those critiques — to be terrified of the dark underbelly of social media that glorifies disordered eating, to have real critiques of the American and global food system — and to still revel in the joy of what I will begrudgingly here call girl dinner.
That’s because girl dinner isn’t an absolute or a directive. It’s an option. It’s a reward. It’s “Jesus Christ, I do everything around here” dinner. It’s “this is simply all I can muster” dinner. It’s “I’m secretly glad I get to eat alone tonight” dinner. There are nights when I want to reverse-sear a steak, and there are nights when all I can think about is an English muffin drenched in jam with a side of sliced cheddar. Girl dinner is permission. It celebrates cleaning out the fridge at a moment when wasting groceries feels like lighting a paycheck on fire. It highlights the fact that when I’m left to my own devices, a little bit lazy and mad for sustenance, I don’t default to the Doordash app and its avalanche of fees.
My stepgrandma Rosemary, a dietitian, always said the key to eating well, for a healthy adult, was moderation. And as I think about girl dinner and the debates around it, I think about her. She was an angelic woman, the slowest eater I ever met, and I know she nibbled on a girl dinner or two in her day. She’d have said they were fine — in moderation, of course. So tonight, I will lick peanut butter off a spoon and follow it up with a bowl of plums and a few pearls of mozzarella. Tomorrow, I’ll order a burger and a pint of beer, and the server will probably set them down in front of my husband, who will slide them toward me and have chicken.
There are days for grazing and days for gluttony, days for early dinner and days for working through dinner and slurping a milkshake before bed. Some days, you can muster a dinner that fits everyone’s definition, and some other days you cannot, and most of the time, dinner falls somewhere in the satisfied in-between.
”this is simply all I can muster” pasta
serves: 1
prep time: 5 minutes
cook time: 20 minutes
This is a dinner for the in-between, when I’m eating alone and don’t really want to cook but want a meal nonetheless. It’s also perfect for these late July days, when there’s no shortage of tomatoes and basil within a few steps of many of our kitchens.
Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil.
Pour 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a shallow pan and turn the heat to medium-low. Add ½ of a cup of cherry tomatoes — the tinier the better — and cook, undisturbed, for about two minutes, until the cherries are sizzling and sweating.
Meanwhile, thinly slice 1 small clove of garlic and 2 basil leaves. When the tomatoes are hot and sweaty and getting loud, add the garlic and stir to combine. The garlic will begin to gently brown. If the browning looks like something other than gentle, lower your heat a bit.
By this point, your water should be boiling. Add 2 ounces of spaghetti, and cook it according to the instructions on the packaging.
Back to the tomatoes. Keep an eye on them, and stir them occasionally. After about 10 minutes, they will begin to burst, some on their own and some as you stir. Once most have burst, tick the heat down to low and add ¼ of a teaspoon of paprika, ⅛ of a teaspoon of ground coriander and a big pinch of kosher salt. Stir to mix in the spices, and keep cooking the tomato mixture until each of the tomatoes has lost its shape, another three or four minutes.
If your noodles aren’t ready yet, turn the heat on the tomatoes down to the lowest possible option. If they are ready, add them to the sauce and stir to coat the noodles in the garlicky oil for about 30 seconds. Transfer the pasta to a bowl, and grate ½ of an ounce of Manchego cheese (or, if you’re not one for measuring cheese, as much Manchego as you’d like) on top. Garnish with the sliced basil.