Balkan Breakfast, Girl Dinner And Our Hunger For Simple Eating
Photo by Victoria Morgan/Unsplash
Maybe it’s because I’ve been funneled into the depths of the viral food content algorithm on TikTok, but recently, I’ve been seeing multiple posts a day about so-called “Balkan breakfast,” a form of breakfast ostensibly eaten in the Balkans involving whole, raw vegetables eaten with the hands and/or with the help of a small pocket knife, bread ripped straight from the loaf and myriad other ultra-simple ingredients that essentially require no actual cooking.
It is, if you ask me, just another iteration of “girl dinner,” albeit less gendered, more culturally specific and eaten at the beginning of the day, not the end. All the same elements are there: the seemingly random ingredients plucked from the fridge, the desire to eat with one’s hands instead of utensils, the appeal of a fresh, healthy meal without much effort.
I, too, am captured both by the idea of girl dinner and the Balkan breakfast, and I understand why these kinds of meals are so apt to go viral. They capture a simplicity that we seem to have lost in the constant rumble of our current food culture.
Living in 2024—especially if you happen to be located in a large or mid-sized city—means that you have basically unlimited food options available to you at nearly all times. Not only can you go out to restaurants that serve Indian, Italian, Thai, Bangladeshi, Greek, Ethiopian, Polish, Vietnamese food whenever you want, but through food delivery apps, you can actually get all these cuisines delivered to your door whenever you want them. Sometimes I stare at Uber Eats for 40 minutes just trying to decide what to eat before deciding to go cook a cheap packet of ramen instead.