TikTok's 'girl dinner' is the reincarnation of Tumblr's eating disorder culture

Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes Disordered eating has been trending on social media since the early 2010s, but now it wears a new deceptive mask By Emma Shemko, Opinion Staff Writer cw: eating disorders Approximately one million Canadians have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Teens and young adults are the most at risk groups. Women are particularly vulnerable as they make up approximately 80 per cent of patients. The risk of developing an eating disorder is further heightened by social media trends that glorify unhealthy eating.   The ‘girl dinner’ trend went viral on TikTok this past summer and remains popular on the for you page. ‘Girl dinner’ started as a joke where young women and girls were showing weird combinations of food they put together as meals. However, the trend quickly slipped into the dangerous territory of disordered eating. People now use it to show off their tiny portions of food. Dinner implies a full meal, but many ‘girl dinners’ are barely a snack.   When ‘girl dinner’ first started promoting unsafe behaviours, I was reminded of the eating disorder culture that ran rampant on Tumblr in the early 2010s. Both ‘girl dinner’ and the pro-anorexia rhetoric from Tumblr encourage
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