What Girls Like to Eat

Hi friendies! You know how your dad likes to mush sardines and capers together on burned toast and maybe fun it up with hot sauce and then fold the toast in half and that’s dinner? That’s called a Dad Snack, a food item that is primarily consumed by a particular group (it’s not racist if the group is “dads”).

Inasmuch as there is also such a thing as Girl Snacks, and more generally, Girl Food, there is no such thing as a girl without issues, from little random guilts to life-consuming, life-ending obsessions about eating, which is just what it is, and not even something that I have the energy for right now because I had walnuts, a Cheesestring, and sugar-free licorice for dinner. HEY-O!

Girls totally love food just like boys but maaaybe even more (?) because we are the sensualists. Say it: seeen-shu-al. But like everything else, the world is set up to fuck with women and girls with its juxtaposed endorsements and demands of all or nothings, feasts or famines, over-the-top why-aren’t-you-eating “one of the guys” bingey free-for-alls or a deeply implicit magaziney anorexic-ethic.

Ultimately the one thing that girls don’t eat is “well.”

CANDY

Chicks love candy because it combines shopping for disposable colorfuls, accessorizing (don’t tell me a handful of Razzles, or a mouth gauzed by blue cotton candy isn’t as sartorially compelling as some Missoni x Target p.o.s.), childhood, and sugar. Sold!

Candy is also useful, with its viscid physical composition and nutritional nothingness, for performing the quasi-bulimia where you taste something and chew it a little bit and then discreetly spit it out into the garbage can, like a bird mommy does for her babies.

Plus, sex-wise, who am I to say that there’s anything wrong with giving a lolly a casual once-over in the proximity of whatever dummy you want to get with? Sounds like an offensively Hollywoodian version of teen sex, but some clichés are clichés for a reason, chief among them how easy boys are. (Also: minty candy is a good thing to have around to mix it up during blowjob times, but please don’t let anyone candy-tongue you. There’s no related sexual payoff and you’ll get an infection.)

SUSHI

Are guys less into the soosh than girls because of the sort-of-not-really pussy quality? Like, “This is close to something I like/am afraid of, but not exactly, so… it threatens me.” Or because it’s not manly to wield two slim sticks for the purpose of verily shoving a too-big piece of something all up in your mouth? Or is it the fussy mixing and moving of wasabi and soy sauce and ginger and the little scoops of green tea ice cream? Whatever/who cares/you suck: sushi rules. I can’t believe I was too provincial to try it until I was 18.

TRICKS

1. Not eating, at all, ever, except for an occasional roasted chicken, one cup of V8 every fortnight, plus unlimited cucumber, lemon wedges, and cocaine.

2. Referring to meals as “snacks” to feel better about eating so much

3. Referring to snacks as “meals” to feel better about not eating enough

4. Never eating in public, so that a) you can binge privately or b) you can pretend you already ate. “I just ate!” Har, har.

5. Smoking a lot of pot so you can enjoy pizza without the usually attendant thing of, like, “Is this allowed?” Which is not to say plenty of girls don’t eat and love pizza, it’s just that if you exist as a female in North America and weren’t homeschooled, you’re going to have a three-second delay of pleasure where a lifetime of food anxiety has to fit. I really do love the idea and occasional reality of twentysomething girls being just as cool about food as their dude-brethren, but how often do you see four chicks mowing on pizza (always pizza) before the bar on a Friday night? That’s right, you don’t.

6. Two or three bites of anything at all. Every time a model is interviewed about what she eats, invariably it’s “Some of a sandwich; some of a milkshake.” SURE YOU DID.

STEAK

It’s total mythsicles that guys are all “Meeeeat”; really, it’s girls who crave it. Like, use your brains. We gush blood out of our bodies like 20 percent of the time; we fuck dicks, which are essentially boneless meat-sticks, and accept their pus into our precious cargo-holds; of course that same organism is going to want some viscerally bloody replenishment. Plus, working an actual, non-metaphorical slab of meat with heavy utensils makes your girl hands look ever-more tragically delicate, like those of the ladies who live on farms.

You know that Action Bronson line “There’s no controlling me / Steak and chocolate got their motherfucking hold on me”? I feel like he’s doing a bit about girls right there. I wish Cathy cartoons and my mom’s refrigeration magnets hadn’t fucked up my feelings about chocolate-enjoyment so much, though. It really begs the question of “Is it possible for a cornerstone of the ‘fucking delicious’ food group to become gross based on its associations with explicitly Lady Food?” I think the answer is sort of … yes. I mean, I still like to build a sugar tower with almost inedibly dark chocolate and dried apricots to eat with my coffee when I am out of milk, so there’s that, but mostly when I think of chocolate and girls I think of how we’re supposed to rely on it as a way out of our eventually, inevitably stupid lives. #DARK

ESPRESSO

It’s like a whole meal when you put milk and cinnamon in it!

SALAD

There is no more girl-esque Girl Meal than salad. Sometimes that’s because they can be low on calories and all of that stuff, but remember that a lot of salads, the ones stuffed with avocado and goat cheese and nuts, are just socially acceptable Big Macs. What is so essentially girl about salads is that it’s the industrialized world’s mandated girl meal, the uncontestable lunch order, the expectation, the bonding unit. The sound of salad forks on plates, piercing insubstantial pieces of food and ringing out GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, that’s what salad is about.

POPCORN

If you live alone and without furniture and electronics that may include a kitchen table and chairs, a couch, a television, and a microwave, then you are me! That also means you can’t make microwave popcorn, which sucks.

Movie popcorn (and its step-cousin, movie nachos) doesn’t have any calories because you always forget if corn is a carb, or low G.I., and because you’re at the movies! Which makes popcorn the best snack.

When I make a mini-bag of microwave popcorn at my office, I am the most popular girl for a few minutes until everyone remembers that I’m pretty annoying to be around in the daytime. (“HEY DID YOU SEE THAT ARTICLE ABOUT METH OH MY GOD REMEMBER GHOSTWRITER WHO HAS A CIGARETTE PLAY JACKS WITH ME UNDER MY DESK COME ON COME ON THIS IS BORING WHY ARE YOU GUYS ASSHOLES SORRY I’M LATE OK BYEEE” End scene.) It smells good.

COCONUT WATER

Notable for tasting like jizz. Also, acts as a post-hangover electrolyte-restorer in the manner of Gatorade but with two better things going for it: 1) healthy, but whatever and 2) provides a confrontational sensory experience of “Yeah, I am drinking jizz. Juuuust drinking it.”

SHITTING

Like, lest we forget that watching someone eat their way through a grilled cheese is watching their prelude to shit. There are many twisted threads between “food” and “girls” and the fact that the bulk of it ends up blowing out their asses is… what it is.

CUPCAKES

“Cupcake Culture” refers to the insidious movement toward the sweet, the twee, the totes adobie, the insignificant, as the defining mode of girl culture. I hate this, because it sucks. Please don’t watch that Zooey Deschanel TV show, OK?

Cupcakes, by which I mean the nu-gigantic cupcakes, are also retarded to eat. What, I’m supposed to get that tower of icing into my mouth all at once? Or, am I supposed to get the whole thing on my face like sprinkly-sparkly bukkake? What’s next, gagging on it so hard I cry? Fuck y’all. I see what you’re doing with this.

CHEESE

Courtney Love says that if you stop eating cheese you’ll lose weight and that’s probably true but who cares?

VEGAN

It’s not like doing a 100-mile-ish vegan diet with an organic emphasis isn’t obviously (probably?) the right way to eat. Unfortunately only about 5% of white peoples are selfless enough to give up bacon and are willing to align themselves with something so daggy and are cool with doing more work than pulling up to a drive-thru window juuuust when their blood sugar is somewhere around their knees. Vegan, real vegan, is hard fucking work.

Anyway, the thing is, very often girls who are “vegan” are actually doing a better job covering for their rexie tendencies than the chicks who “just ate.” Same goes for the allergics. Like, it’s fine: all of us are weird. But when you pound Pixie Sticks after refusing the goat cheese appetizer it’s like, we know what you’re up to, sister.

PASTA

Hahahahaha.

DIET COKE

A Diet Cokehead is a real thing, not just one of the reasons Heathers was awesome, and it’s an insidious way for The Man to get defenseless women who are too small-town for real diet drugs (a.k.a. iced Americanos drank super-fast first thing in the morning so that you’re too sick and wired to eat for hours; crack and cocaine; internet diet pills). In protest of the ubiquitous DC (and in protest of those brand-destroying Perrier ads, Christ) I have replaced Diet Coke with a big glass of ice water and lemon. I stick in a straw and call it “power water” so it’s like Mmmmm! Oh is that boring? OK.

OK byeeee!

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway

Previously: What Girls Like to Wear