Brett Seybert

I’m a little ashamed to admit how hard I laughed reading this admittedly silly piece by the always great Albert Burneko at the always great (and, to quote the piece, “incredibly deranged”) Defector about the recent Daily Beast story about the eating habits of Ron DeSantis.

The quote in the Daily Beast story from a former DeSantis staffer is great – and probably because of that, I’ve seen the same line quoted in probably half a dozen other summaries since it was originally published. In it, the staffer claims that DeSantis “would sit in meetings and eat in front of people [. . .] like a starving animal who has never eaten before.”

Burneko picks out the most hilarious and disturbing nugget from the story and gives it the full Defector treatment:

The story’s most vivid detail concerns DeSantis once memorably slurping chocolate pudding out of his own bare goddamn hand like a fucking freak:

Enshrined in DeSantis lore is an episode from four years ago: During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert–by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.

It’s the “three of his fingers” detail that really makes this anecdote sing. Because now you kind of can’t help but picture it, right? Not just “with his fingers” or “out of his hand,” but specifically three fingers. Really disturbing stuff!

While I laughed embarrassingly hard while reading this story, Burneko is 100% wrong about one thing:

The likeliest possibility seems to me to be a pincer type of deal: The index and middle finger, plus the thumb, sort of gently pinching a glob of pudding like a wad of chaw and lifting it to the face of Ron DeSantis, to be slurped at by his large wet tongue, with the now spit-sucked pincer then returning to the chocolate pudding dessert, like the world’s most accursed prize-machine claw, for another disgusting saliva-impregnated clot of chocolate goop.

Having been, in my younger and more vulnerable years, party to a similarly disturbing display in which a friend of mine¹ drunkenly devoured corn syrup from a makeshift honey pot as part of a dismantled Winnie the Pooh Halloween costume, I can say with some amount of confidence that the method employed to eat pudding with one’s fingers is much more likely to be the “garden-spade technique":

Three fingers lined up and pressed tightly together, stabbing down into the pudding dessert and scooping out a little heap. This could be the index, middle, and ring fingers (a Large spade) or the middle, ring, and pinky fingers (Small).