The culture at the centre of this speculative meal is contemporary digital womanhood, a subculture shaped through online feminism and identity-based trends circulating on social media platforms. This culture presents a camera-ready version of feminist adulthood that claims empowerment, yet remains tangled up in exhaustion, self-sacrifice, and the pressure to appear 'put together' at all times. Trends such as girl dinner, girl math, and the phrase "I'm just a girl" appear empowering on their surface, but in practice, they repackage burnout and lowered expectations as aesthetic choice. It's a feminism of vibes, not politics. You can't meaningfully fight for equality while also joking that numbers don't apply to you because of "girl math," and you can't thrive when your daily meal is a handful of olives and cheese because you've spent all your energy caring for others first.
As Jessica Roy (2023) notes in her New York Times piece on the girl dinner trend, these meals can function as a joyful refusal of domestic expectations; there is no partner to feed, no children demanding a balanced plate, no pressure to perform "proper" domesticity. It's "no preparation, just vibes". It's an aesthetically pleasing act of opting out that almost feels rebellious. I get the appeal. I'm an annoyingly loud, proud feminist, and I still catch myself serving men beyond my bandwidth at home, in friendships, and at work. That's the tension this project confronts: how digital feminism can look radical while women's actual lives are still defined by depletion, overwork, and invisible labour.
The Meal: Ingredients, Preparation, Rituals, and Environment
The ingredients in this speculative meal were chosen for their visual appeal and low preparatory labour, reflecting how girl dinner shifts nourishment into performance. The plate includes pomegranates and cranberries for their rich colour; exotic starfruit and longans as a gesture toward worldly taste; artisanal cheese and rustic sourdough to represent curated domesticity; and pistachios, which contribute texture and a sense of casual luxury. They operate more as decoration than sustenance; the decorative pearls scattered on the plates deliberately blur the boundary between ornament and nourishment, mirroring the way women's beauty, labour, and personal value often blur together under patriarchal expectations.
The preparation is intentionally minimal. Nothing is cooked or prepared; everything is simply rinsed, sliced, and placed. It echoes girl dinner's comforting rejection of domestic labour while also imagining a future where women are so depleted that curating scraps is all they have energy for. The primary ritual occurs before eating: photographing the spread, posting it to your story on Instagram (which I did), and receiving validation. Consumption is almost an afterthought. From this spread you'd get a nibble of cheese, a few berries, a slice of starfruit if guests were present. Conversation would drift toward the appearance of the spread rather than its substance. No one would leave full; fullness is not the point. The point is the performance of having a beautiful, effortless life.
Cultural Context and My Research Interests
This project stems from my own exhaustion. I'm tired of domestic labour being simultaneously expected and mocked. Girl dinner becomes the perfect symbol of the widening gap between feminist aesthetics and feminist material reality: a meal that looks like empowerment and abundance but emerges from burnout and invisible labour. Jameela Jamil famously asked why influencers monetize domesticity: why do they need a second income stream to perform how effortless it all is? That contradiction reveals the truth: the performance is lucrative, but the lifestyle itself is not.
My research interests revolve around contemporary womanhood, media, performance, and the ways femininity is curated for digital spaces, often through humour that masks or exposes the pressures beneath it. This speculative meal aligns with those interests by exposing how these pressures manifest through food, ritual, and presentation. Social platforms don't invent these expectations, but they do refine them. This project uses the speculative genre to examine that tension, creating a meal that is hollow, comforting, aesthetically pleasing and nutritionally concerning all at once. It's a future that feels entirely possible because, in many ways, it's already here.
Roy, J. (2023). Is It a Meal? A Snack? No, It's 'Girl Dinner.' The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/style/girl-dinner.html
Note: The photograph used in this project was taken by me and is not AI generated.
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