If you’ve been on the internet recently, it’s likely you’ve heard of ‘girl dinner’. Typically, girl dinners are meals which comprise various bits and pieces: think an artfully arranged mini charcuterie board of crackers, ham, carrots, olives, and a few slices of cheese. Others are a bit more chaotic and feature meals consisting of chicken nuggets and chocolate milk or Kombucha and Reese’s peanut butter cups. As one user put it, girl dinner is all about “no preparation just vibes”.

We’ve always been obsessed with knowing other people’s diets, but it’s an obsession that has only grown stronger since the advent of the internet. ‘What I eat in a day’ videos began to pop up on YouTube in the early 2010s, and by the end of the decade they had become a popular format among lifestyle vloggers. Fast forward to today, and the ‘what I eat in a day’ tag on TikTok has over 17.7 billion views. People love to pore over celeb diets online too: earlier this year, Gwyneth Paltrow was ridiculed for revealing she has bone broth for lunch most days, while Khloe Kardashian’s tour of her immaculately-organised pantry went viral in May. 

Girl dinner is ultimately just the latest in a long line of viral trends which allow us to catch a glimpse of what other people eat. Arguably there’s nothing particularly novel or interesting about the concept of girl dinner anyway: as many Brits – including Nigella Lawson – have pointed out, ‘girl dinners’ are just ‘picky bits’. What’s more interesting is the backlash to girl dinner – and how this reveals just how difficult it is to moderate disordered eating content online.

In the days since the girl dinner went viral, the internet has been brimming with discourse about whether the trend is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The argument goes: on the one hand, many of these videos show women eating a broad range of foods and seem to honour the idea of ‘intuitive eating’. On the other hand, there are also a lot of videos which feature particularly meagre girl dinners, or barely anything which could constitute a ‘dinner’ at all: such as a can of Red Bull and a Blue Razz vape or a cigarette and a single cup of tea.

Plus – rightly or wrongly – calling the trend girl dinner evokes disordered eating habits, as eating disorders are historically feminised (despite a quarter being experienced by men). “It is women who are assumed to have unhealthy (or less than ideally healthy) relationships with food,” explains Dr Ysabel Gerrard, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield and an expert on social media’s content moderation policies. “Women have long been the targets of diet culture and body shaming, and while men of course face their own norms and cultures, food restriction and minimisation is a distinctly feminised behaviour.” 

In light of this, a number of people on social media have claimed the trend ‘glorifies eating disorders’, while several mainstream publications have also questioned whether it’s ‘controversial’. There was similar backlash to the ‘what I eat in a day’ trend after it took off too – now, when you search for ‘what I eat in a day’ videos on TikTok, a link to eating disorder charity BEAT pops up.

It’s understandable that this sort of content triggers such intense discussion and backlash, given the proliferation of harmful content on social media. “According to statistics, those between the ages of 15 and 35 have the highest engagement with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. This is also the age group for which eating disorders are most common,” notes a recent Psychology Today article. Additionally, a study published in the Lancet last month found that the pandemic fuelled a 42 per cent surge in eating disorders among teenage girls in the UK, while recent research found that Gen Z are more concerned with weight loss than previous generations: 42 per cent of teens were attempting to lose weight in 2015, compared to just 28.5 per cent in 2005. 

With all this in mind, it tracks that people instinctively oppose any content which appears to show an ‘unhealthy’ amount or type of food. But if we really want to help young people with eating disorders, it’s not as simple as ‘videos with lots of healthy food = good’ and ‘videos with very little food = bad’.

“It shouldn’t be assumed that all videos posted to this trend are of individuals experiencing disordered eating. Some of the videos are clearly intended to represent instances in your life when you just want some comfort food, or something a bit random,” Dr Gerrard says. “Some, of course, may represent occasions when you don’t eat very much at all [...] But videos depicting food restriction may not represent an intent to promote eating disorders, and to instead engage in shared (dark) humour”.

Context is everything when it comes to moderating content like this online. As Gerrard put it in a 2021 interview with Logic Mag: “What you need is context. You need the caption. You need the comments underneath [...] And that’s why we’re always going to need humans to do the work of content moderation. We have to find ways of making their work easier, but we need them.”

There is a lot of genuinely harmful content out there, but equally, there are real repercussions from being too censorious when it comes to moderating content relating to disordered eating online, which is why it’s jarring to see so many people and publications rush to condemn the ‘girl dinner’ trend for ‘glamourising’ anorexia. Deleting entire accounts which are erroneously flagged as actively ‘promoting’ disordered eating can have an incredibly damaging impact on people in recovery who use social media platforms to find community and access support. People with eating disorders often try to keep their behaviour secret, too – meaning that the internet is potentially one of the few places a sufferer might be able to speak freely about their experience.

Even if the idea of ‘girl dinner’ isn’t particularly interesting in and of itself, the backlash to the trend reveals just how there’s seldom an obvious distinction between online content which promotes eating disorder recovery and content which promotes disordered eating, full stop – especially when we consider that society’s obsession with thinness is so ubiquitous that it bleeds into our culture in so many insidious ways. But it’s vital for those in recovery that moderators aren’t too trigger-happy when it comes to assessing this sort of content. 

“A person’s account can connect them to a highly valuable, sometimes life saving support network, and while there are some TikToks that do break the rules and perhaps ought to be removed, taking away a whole account puts an already-vulnerable person at greater risk,” Dr Gerrard says. “Anorexia, for example, has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder.” With this in mind, we should think carefully before labelling an entire trend as ‘problematic’ – especially when the internet could be one of the only places where eating disorder sufferers feel able to speak about eating habits frankly and freely.

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