‘Tradwives’, ‘Girl Dinner’ and ‘Snack Tins’: the new era of diet culture
Blog, Written by Heather Alden
Viral trends like ‘girl dinner’ and cute snack tins often appear light-hearted and wholesome, yet beneath the curated aesthetics, these trends signal a wider cultural shift towards restrictive eating and harmful gender ideals. Often equating small portions with cool-girl femininity and clean eating with moral superiority.
The nature of food-related content online
A 2024 study analysing 250 diet-related TikToks found that over 20% displayed disordered or restrictive eating behaviours, and more than 50% included bodychecking. This type of content isn’t new but is becoming increasingly normalised through content which doesn’t appear to be promoting diet culture at first glance.
This raises the question: are seemingly wholesome trends more damaging than they first seem? And should tradwife content and ‘girl dinner’ really be influencing mainstream food behaviours and aesthetics?
Tradwives: reinforcing thinness, domesticity and gender roles
What if making everything from scratch isn’t about health but reinforcing gender roles? Viral tradwife content on TikTok marks the shift towards conservative values and traditional gender roles, romanticising and aestheticising women’s ‘domestic role’ in the kitchen. Although cooking can be a way to connect with friends, to culture and a source of joy, trad wife influencers promote a lifestyle which is inaccessible to most.
Creators like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, from ballerina farm, promote cooking food from scratch and avoiding shop-bought or mass-produced foods: which for many people is unattainable day-to-day. Not to mention idealising local, organic, homemade, foods perpetuates our societal obsession with avoiding ‘ultra-processed foods’ or UPFs, popularised by books like ‘Ultra-Processed People’ by Chris van Tulleken. Framing all UPFs as ‘bad’ ignores the benefits of food processing for accessibility, food safety and affordability. In fact, many UPFs are good for us, for example, fortified breakfast cereals are a great source of iron and fibre.
Furthermore, the avoidance of UPFs and promotion of ‘clean eating’ perpetuates eugenic discourses such as bodily purity and purity of certain foods. For many people these narratives can also become a pipeline to restrictive eating patterns and orthorexia.
Tradwife content also glamourises a more traditional society, one in which women didn’t have the right to vote and slavery was widely accepted. The marble countertops, perfectly curated outfits and endless homemade meals might make housework and being a stay-at-home mum look ideal, but it also promotes a historical worldview in which women submit to gender roles, relinquishing much of their political and financial power. A detailed report by Kings College London highlighted that the rise in tradwife content risks reversing progress to gender equality, with potentially serious repercussions for women’s autonomy within the household.
Whilst the trad wife influencers themselves might be happy with their lifestyle, these ‘aspirational’ lifestyles online can subtlety shape expectations of how women ‘should’ eat, behave and look.
Girl dinner: a gendered way of looking at food
Girl dinner might seem less problematic, framing quick snacky dinners and leftovers as empowering or freeing. Girl dinner might have good intentions at its core, but these trends can fuel comparison and gendered assumptions about certain ways of eating. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with leftovers or cold picky-bit style dinners, ‘girl dinner’ encourages a gendered way of looking at food. In a time of rising conservatism erasing nonbinary folk only fuels right-wing political agendas. It’s also a slippery slope, with some people online posting a cup of coffee or gum and calling it ‘girl dinner’.
A Vogue 2025 post describes a girl dinner table as being “filled with aesthetically pleasing bits and bobs” with Caesar salads and “burgers designed to be quartered and shared”. They recommend restaurants where for “a decent £25” you could get a martini and fries. “What more could a girl want?” Maybe more than chips for dinner? By associating aesthetics with ‘girl dinner’, Vogue is telling us beauty standards for women now extend beyond just how we look, but to how our plates look too.
Source: Instagram (thenakedlight_)
Snack tins: normalising eating like a 5-year-old?
You’ve probably seen the viral snack tin trend, where influencers (mostly women) pack palm-sized, aesthetic snack tins (mostly with organic, health foods). Whilst some influencers might be packing a whole chocolate bar and a handful of nuts in there, others advocate for the snack tin as a form of portion control or a way to achieve ‘cool girl’ status. Whilst influencers might be making a tenth of a KitKat and a single segment of orange look aesthetic, many of these videos are, whether intentional or not, reinforcing the idea that women have (or should have) small appetites. And if eating our snack out of a tiny tin makes us a cool girl what does a bag of crisps, a slice of toast or a bowl of cereal make us.
Why is this important for eating disorder recovery?
This cultural shift and the intense focus on food, health and bodies can feel particularly overwhelming for people in eating disorder recovery. The pressure to shrink, optimise our health and the normalisation of restrictive behaviour can make recovery feel even harder. Although many of these trends don’t explicitly give diet advice, repeated exposure to content that subtly equates moral superiority and womanhood with self-control, purity and thinness can be just as harmful.
Food as a source of joy
We can challenge many of these normalised narratives by celebrating eating, honouring cultural foods, pleasure and autonomy. Trends come and go but by being more compassionate to ourselves and trying not to compare ourselves to the standards we see online can help us build a better relationship with food and our bodies. And the good news: when we stop engaging with this kind of content, our algorithms learn to stop showing us it.
Heather is a dietetic student passionate about accessible and weight-inclusive dietetic practice. She is currently completingher dissertation on the impact of calorie labelling on menus in the UK. She has a growing interest in how our environments and public health policies shape our relationships with food and health inequities.
Blog reviewed by Sophie Corbett, Specialist Dietitian and Founder of Mental Health Dietitians.
