Why Is Tinned Fish Hot Girl Food Now?
Tinned fish is the ultimate hot girl food, Caroline Goldfarb, co-founder of the tinned fish company Fishwife, recently told Nylon in a piece about the internets conservas obsession. There is no food that will make you hotter than tinned fish. Straight up. I dont.  Advertisement  To be clear, Goldfarb wasnt the first to make this specific observation. Back in March, a tweet from Nylon editor Layla Halabian claimed: Hot girls are always like tinned fish is actually really good. Halabians comment was niche by internet standards, garnering about 5,000 likes, but in circles like mine, in which sardine recommendations are a common point of conversation, screenshots of the tweet continue to make the rounds in many Instagram stories, including my own. A hot girl walk, for example.) As many people have written on the subject, a hot girl summer and the hot girl descriptor are now more than indicators of attractiveness, but an invocation of confidence and ownership over ones place in the world. Hot girl shit is both something anyone can do and something anyone can aspire to. Advertisement  Anchovies, smoked trout, and the like may be the ultimate, according to Goldfarb, but they arent the only hot girl food. Per references on TikTok, the category includes pickles and McNuggets, but simultaneously acai smoothie bowls and avocado toast; its pictures of spaghetti bolognese, or of penne in vodka sauce, or of sushi, set to audio of Emma Roberts saying Im rich and Im pretty, so it doesnt really matter. Hot girl food can really be anything, according to Twitter: oatmeal, coffee and a croissant, buttered toast, the Crunchwrap Supreme, red velvet cake, ice cream and vape, oysters, lentil soup, gnocchi, and so on. Hot girl food seems to suggest an appreciation for eating, but not in a complicated way, or an unconventional way, or a way thats particularly concerned with wellness. Its more Alison Roman than it is Gwyneth Paltrow. Indeed, Nylon writer Sophia June attributed the current tinned fish trend, in part, to embattled hot girl Alison Roman. (Though people were certainly eating tinned fish before that, Romans shallot pasta, which requires a can of anchovies, was the New York Times top recipe of 2020.) Part of Romans allure is that she appears more chill and carefree than many cooking stars; until a recent move, she was known to cook in an imperfect Brooklyn kitchen using minimal tools and dishes, yet turned out perfect-looking food. What she sells is replicable, unfussy recipes, but also hints of a life that audiences want to attain. Advertisement  June posits that the tinned fish moment fits into a larger aspirational lifestyle which falls somewhere between European tapas and a Jewish deli aesthetic. This lifestyle is minimalist, simple, casual, and lends itself to sensual eating experiences, like sitting outside with wine and a baguette, Fishwife co-founder Becca Millstein told June. We all have main character energy now, as the New Yorker recently proclaimed, which leads to a tendency to turn even the tiniest moments into vicarious spectacles. Curating moments in this way sells a specific, chosen image to the people perceiving our lives. Hot girl food is about a sense of romanticizing simplicity; like the act of cracking open a can of smoked fish, hot girl food is seemingly effortless. But of course, even the things that are portrayed to us as effortless require effort; this is the myth of no makeup makeup, or the effortless dinner party that can be flung together with barely any notice. What effortlessness tends to mean is to make an effort but without the appearance of trying too harda metric used particularly to scrutinize women. Hot girl food feels like an extension of this idea: Its trying but not trying too hard, whatever that means, and its accessible, but still out of reach enough to feel aspirational. In a 2018 episode of the show Alone Together, main character Esther, played by comedian Esther Povitsky, buys a green herb detox and spirulina crisps at a shop in LA after seeing an attractive woman buy them. Its hot girl food, Esther says, though she isnt quite sure what shes buying. For similar reasons, the manifestation of hot girl food on TikTok rankles me a bit. I know its in jest, but when thin, conventionally attractive people post pictures of, say, cheese-laden pasta accompanied by that Im rich and Im pretty audio, I cant help but think of the cool girl trope: the one that allows some women to talk freely about how they love to eat and how much they love junk, but without the scrutiny that would be imposed upon women who veer outside societal norms of appearance and body size. I think also about that meme that says: Is it fashion, or are they just skinny?