For those who’ve been on the web 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 couple of slices of cheese. Others are a bit more chaotic and have 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 all the time been obsessive about knowing other people’s diets, nevertheless it’s an obsession that has only grown stronger for the reason that advent of the web. ‘What I eat in a day’ videos began to pop up on YouTube within the early 2010s, and by the top of the last decade that they had develop into a preferred format amongst lifestyle vloggers. Fast forward to today, and the ‘what I eat in a day’ tag on TikTok has over 17.7 billion views. People like to pore over celeb diets online too: earlier this 12 months, 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 newest in an extended line of viral trends which permit us to catch a glimpse of what other people eat. Arguably there’s nothing particularly novel or interesting in regards to the concept of girl dinner anyway: as many Brits – including Nigella Lawson – have identified, ‘girl dinners’ are only ‘picky bits’. What’s more interesting is the backlash to girl dinner – and the way this reveals just how difficult it’s to moderate disordered eating content online.

In the times for the reason that girl dinner went viral, the web has been brimming with discourse about whether the trend is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The argument goes: on the one hand, lots of these videos show women eating a broad range of foods and appear to honour the thought of ‘intuitive eating’. However, there are also a number of videos which feature particularly meagre girl dinners, or barely anything which could constitute a ‘dinner’ in any respect: equivalent to 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 1 / 4 being experienced by men). “It’s women who’re assumed to have unhealthy (or lower than ideally healthy) relationships with food,” explains Dr Ysabel Gerrard, a Lecturer in Digital Media and Society on the University of Sheffield and an authority on social media’s content moderation policies. “Women have long been the targets of weight-reduction plan culture and body shaming, and while men after all face their very own norms and cultures, food restriction and minimisation is a distinctly feminised behaviour.” 

In light of this, quite a few 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, whenever you seek for ‘what I eat in a day’ videos on TikTok, a link to eating disorder charity BEAT pops up.

@alanalavv Replying to @María GM thanks to everyone who commented ‘girl dinner’ on my snack plates and introduced me to the perfect concept / phrase ever 🫒🧡 #girldinner #snackplate #snackplates ♬ original sound – hanana

It’s comprehensible that this type of content triggers such intense discussion and backlash, given the proliferation of harmful content on social media. “In response to statistics, those between the ages of 15 and 35 have the best engagement with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. This can also be the age group for which eating disorders are most typical,” notes a recent Psychology Today article. Moreover, a study published within the Lancet last month found that the pandemic fuelled a 42 per cent surge in eating disorders amongst teenage girls within the UK, while recent research found that Gen Z are more concerned with weight reduction than previous generations: 42 per cent of teens were attempting to shed pounds in 2015, in comparison with just 28.5 per cent in 2005. 

With all this in mind, it tracks that individuals instinctively oppose any content which appears to indicate an ‘unhealthy’ amount or variety of food. But when we really need to assist young individuals with eating disorders, it’s not so simple as ‘videos with numerous healthy food = good’ and ‘videos with little or no food = bad’.

“It shouldn’t be assumed that every one videos posted to this trend are of people experiencing disordered eating. A number of the videos are clearly intended to represent instances in your life whenever you just want some comfort food, or something a bit random,” Dr Gerrard says. “Some, after all, may represent occasions whenever you don’t eat very much in any respect […] But videos depicting food restriction may not represent an intent to advertise eating disorders, and to as a substitute engage in shared (dark) humour”.

Context is all the things in relation to moderating content like this online. As Gerrard put it in a 2021 interview with Logic Mag: “What you would like is context. You wish the caption. You wish the comments underneath […] And that’s why we’re all the time going to wish humans to do the work of content moderation. We now have to search out ways of creating their work easier, but we want them.”

There may be a number of genuinely harmful content on the market, but equally, there are real repercussions from being too censorious in relation to moderating content regarding disordered eating online, which is why it’s jarring to see so many individuals and publications rush to sentence the ‘girl dinner’ trend for ‘glamourising’ anorexia. Deleting entire accounts that are erroneously flagged as actively ‘promoting’ disordered eating can have an incredibly damaging impact on people in recovery who use social media platforms to search out community and access support. Individuals with eating disorders often attempt to keep their behaviour secret, too – meaning that the web is potentially one in all the few places a sufferer might give you the option to talk freely about their experience.

Even when the thought 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 after we consider that society’s obsession with thinness is so ubiquitous that it bleeds into our culture in so many insidious ways. Nevertheless it’s vital for those in recovery that moderators aren’t too trigger-happy in relation to assessing this type of content. 

“An individual’s account can connect them to a highly beneficial, sometimes life saving support network, and while there are some TikToks that do break the foundations and maybe should be removed, taking away an entire account puts an already-vulnerable person at greater risk,” Dr Gerrard says. “Anorexia, for instance, has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder.” With this in mind, we should always consider carefully before labelling a complete trend as ‘problematic’ – especially when the web may very well be one in all the one places where eating disorder victims feel able to talk about eating habits frankly and freely.

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