Liberation from the kitchen: I love the ‘girl dinner’

There’s the occasional slippage into decadence when it comes to the girl dinner, writes Nikki Gemmell.

A girl dinner rules in a world without men and I’ve been known to fall upon them with joy and relief. Yes, they’re officially now a thing, thanks to social media, which has been recently celebrating the sparse and eccentric delights of the man-free dinner for one, on a night in, all by yourself.

No partner or family or flatmates about? That’ll be a slice of toast with Vegemite thank you very much. Maybe crackers and cheese. A bowl of instant porridge. A tuna dip eaten with a spoon, direct from the tub. I’ve long been a proponent of the girl dinner squeezed into the corners of a crammed life. Easy, quick, no fuss. If there was no family about, the fridge would be very sparse indeed, and quite possibly a bar fridge. The oven, like Carrie Bradshaw’s, would be used for storage. Who needs one anyway now, with the energy-efficient wonder of the air fryer? The times, they are a’changing.

There’s the occasional slippage into decadence when it comes to the girl dinner. Last night, after six hours on the road, it was a packet of snakes and a carton of chocolate milk from a servo in the middle of the bush. Disgusted? I direct you to the delirious dissection of the girl dinner on social media, a moniker coined by TikTokker Olivia Maher. She displayed her typical meal for one: bread, cheese, pickles, grapes. Labelled it “girl dinner” – otherwise known as “medieval peasant dinner”, and thus a viral moment was born. Because so many women related.

@liviemaher

#girldinner#medievaltiktok

♬ original sound - Olivia Maher

Girl dinners are also known as picky bits. Nibbles nights. Bits and bobs. And quite possibly, in depression days, bubble and squeak. Now they’re non-cooked bitsy meals which no sane man would ever touch regularly, but which women can happily exist on for days on end. Yet if you’re a female in a partnership with a male, his eating habits so often vine their way into yours.

This reminds me of an offhand comment from Madeleine Albright, once the most powerful woman in the world. And what of the eating habits of that former US secretary of state? “In the 23 years I was married to Joe,” she ruminated, “his tastes became mine. After he left, I rediscovered the fact I didn’t like beef – even though for years we had eaten it almost every night.” Ah, so even Madam Secretary had known, in her private life, the creep of capitulation; how much a woman’s most basic choices can be reoriented by their partner.

Nutrition therapist Ian Marber once declared of freshly divorced patients: “They’ve usually been comfort-eating their way through life, and have adopted the eating habits of the dominant partner.” Who hasn’t witnessed a newly single woman dropping several dress sizes, because, perhaps, she can suddenly skip the evening meal? 

Frankly, I’d be happy with a hearty brekkie and a meal at about 3pm and be done and dusted for the day; because that’s what my body tells me it requires. But I have a family to think of and if I fed them all the typical girl dinner, endlessly, they’d starve. But oh, the liberation from the kitchen that this new way entails; from the endless thinking of, so, what’ll it be tonight?

@arkaneskye

boy dinner #boydinner#girldinner @karma carr

♬ Boy Dinner by Arkane Skye - Arkane Skye              🪳

And does the boy dinner exist? TikTokkers have stepped into the breach with that one too, and helpfully let us know that a quick dinner for the lads means frozen pizza. A steak and nothing else. A whole chicken breast on a fork. Basically, no vegetables in sight. Plates optional. Ditto cutlery. So where exactly are we heading with all this? Quite possibly the death of the dinner party. And of elaborately cooked dinners if you’re by yourself. And ovens. Still struck by that image of übermensch Madam Albright eating something she didn’t like almost every night of her married life. Another world, a different way of life, or is it?