First, social media gave us "girl dinner"— those snackable plates with crackers, deli meat, maybe a few olives and some fruit. Now, the internet has served up "boy kibble," a single-bowl mix of ground beef and white rice that closely resembles dog food.
Driven by convenience and high-protein goals, boy kibble has taken off among fitness enthusiasts.
"This is someone that generally is looking to bulk up and gain muscle mass and wants it to be pretty simple," says Zachary Mulvihill, a clinical professor and physician at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
And simple it is. Aside from switching between different types of ground meat, such as turkey instead of beef, and replacing white rice with quinoa or pasta, there isn't much variety in boy kibble recipes.
But the main criticism from the internal medicine specialist is what he calls "a glaring absence of fiber and vegetables" in many popular boy kibble plates.
"If you were to look at your plate, 50% of your plate should be vegetables. Twenty-five percent of your plate should be carbs, and 25% should be protein," Mulvihill says. "If we're looking at the boy kibble plate, half the plate's missing because there's no vegetables. It's 50% rice and 50% protein."
He suggests a simple fix: Just add veggies you enjoy. He recommends precooked beets and frozen vegetables to maintain the convenience factor.
"Vegetables are good for your muscles too," he says. "It's super-important to have fiber in your diet. We know that that's important for your microbiome and avoiding constipation."
Meal prep trends, one-pot recipes and smorgasbord plates have become popular in recent years as a way to make healthy eating easier for people with busy lives.
"Young people might not have a lot of extra time, extra money. They might not have a lot of experience cooking on their own [or know] how to make things that are palatable and healthy," Mulvihill explains. "So, like, you come home from work, you're tired, you're trying to hit whatever your nutritional goals are."
Thirty-year-old Marquis Hawkes works as a government contractor and is a part-time personal trainer. Although he enjoys cooking, he says his schedule doesn't leave much time for it during the week.
"I eat it probably like three or four times a week," Hawkes says. "You don't have to spend an hour in the kitchen, and you could just have it on standby, batch-cook it if necessary."
Hawkes pairs his lean ground beef and white rice with diced onions and peppers. He also drizzles a little hot honey on top for extra flavor.
"You can play with the sauces. Some people go with a low-calorie barbecue sauce and maybe like a hot sauce or possibly ketchup, if that's what you're into," Hawkes says.
His other go-to dinner is chicken breast, white rice and broccoli. He has stuck with this meal routine for some time for the reliable nutrients and bodybuilding benefits. He also likes how the food makes him feel after eating.
"I feel less heavy after my meals," Hawkes says. "I definitely don't want to eat stuff, then just want to go straight to sleep after — especially for lunch, like midday, and have to get back to work."
Los Angeles-based personal trainer Erik Rokisky, 33, suggests trying potatoes instead of white rice because they are higher in fiber and lower in calories.
"White rice can definitely be easy to overeat because, one, it tastes really good. And also when it comes to portions, if you're not weighing it out, it's really hard to kind of estimate how many calories you're getting per cup of rice," Rokisky says.
Rokisky champions paying attention beyond carbohydrates, protein and fats and prioritizing micronutrients.
"Micronutrients play such a big role in your body's functioning, your neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin," Rokisky says. "And all those things influence your food behaviors like eating and staying on top of a diet."
Boy kibble vs. girl dinner
Boy kibble is the clever counter to girl dinner, which was introduced in 2023. Both meals are designed to meet daily nutritional goals while minimizing effort. However, Mulvihill says girl dinner isn't without its flaws.
"In Eastern medicine, it's really important to cook your food and eat cooked food," he says. "With girl dinner, most of the ingredients are generally things that are coming from a bag, being chips or even if it's healthy crackers — they're not cooked. And then there's a lot of things that come out of the fridge. So hummus or maybe raw vegetables."
Although these diet trends have gained traction lately, Adrienne Bitar, a food studies lecturer at Cornell University, says this style of eating isn't new.
"People have been eating stuff like boy kibble and girl dinner all along, but there haven't been recipes for it. It hasn't been celebrated in the public sphere because it's just so mundane," Bitar says.
The diet historian explains that meals like stone soup, porridge and stew have sustained people for centuries with a similar concept.
"I think in our culinary climate we tend to [value] diversity and variety. … But actually having a super-monotonous diet can be really reliable and especially one that you're confident in the nutritional quality," Bitar says.
While girl dinner and boy kibble share the convenience of simplicity, their approaches to food differ.
"In girl dinner, the joy is that you're not cooking," Bitar explains. "Cooking is often seen as like women's labor and it's thankless and it's monotonous and there's no real joy to be had from that kind of labor. So sidestepping the labor is fun and whimsical and celebrates women's taste without involving women's labor."
Bitar explains that with boy kibble, the labor aspect of cooking becomes more utilitarian.
"This isn't like cooking for love or fun or flavor," she says. "It's like, I'm going to be really rational and optimize my nutrition and do this labor once and then I can just reheat it down the week."
Ultimately, boy kibble may not be about flavor or a love for the culinary arts, but about survival in a world that's too busy to cook. It just boils down to an extremely bare-bones approach to upping our protein intake. And as it turns out, the peak of optimized human nutrition can look a lot like what we put in the dog bowl.
Copyright 2026 NPR