The NYT published a made-up-seeming trend piece about something called “girl dinner.” Apparently on social media platforms I’m too old for, young women are making dinner out of snacks. This has led to a discourse about whether this is Bad (dieting, maybe even an eating disorder) or Good (feminist refusal to make some husband-type person meat-and-two-veg). On that, I have no verdict. A snack-meal can be anything calorically! It can also take a while to prepare, if you’re styling it for the ‘gram.
Mainly I keep thinking that this is how we now eat every night what with we’re going into week 8 of no kitchen. A few things casually tossed onto a plate. The preferred approach of toddlers, perhaps, but I now want a dinner that uses every part of the oven: stovetop, oven interior, and broiler, all of it. I want our oven to be installed in the kitchen, not unplugged and under a tarp in the living room.
The question that interests me slightly more is whether it is in fact gendered to have a snack-dinner and I want to say that it isn’t but I kind of have to say from personal experience lo these nearly 40 years on this planet that it is. I feel like there’s a type of dinner out you’d have with female friends and not with a male partner or a mixed-gender group. I also can’t pinpoint what the difference is, having not been outside in the evening since 1842, but I vaguely remember their being one.
It seems more that the difference is between meals alone and meals with another person. I think of a certain NYT article I once podcasted about, where a couple disrupted traditional marriage in a variety of unclear ways, but the meal thing was spelled out:
Worrying about someone else’s dietary needs does tend to inhibit grazing-style snack-dinners, because it’s too complicated to set those up separately for a bunch of people. (Believe me, I am doing this a lot. Cooking-cooking is so much easier.) But this gets to a more meta question about whether solitude is preferable to interdependence. If you’re cooking but this is your contribution to a household and you’re not the only one contributing to it chore-wise, is it oppression? I kind of think no, that it is not oppression, just something that—particularly in the absence of a kitchen—gets old.
"The question that interests me slightly more is whether it is in fact gendered to have a snack-dinner and I want to say that it isn’t but I kind of have to say from personal experience lo these nearly 40 years on this planet that it is."
The entire Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain stands as a monument to male willingness to eat snacks for dinner.
Reminded me of a line from Marjorie Hillis's delightful "Live Alone and Like It," and found it in the appropriately-named chapter "Solitary Refinement:" "You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the living-room couch--one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not yet learned to appreciate." Not perhaps "girl dinner" exactly, but an argument for the casual dinner being gendered even in 1936.