Joe Biden has a hankering for something sweet, and it’s not just the Oval Office. As he waits for final states to count their ballots, I can picture the pro-fracking presidential hopeful hunkered down in some custodial Wilmington, Delaware, conference room chowing down on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Fossil Fuel ice cream.
We know Biden’s favorite dessert is soft serve — it’s even in his Twitter bio. Leftist stans even created a fancam of Biden visiting creameries while on election trails over the years. But not all the fanfare is quite so sweet, and now Sleepy Joe has a new nickname.
Call him Joe Bitin’, because that dude loves chomping on ice cream. No tongue, just teeth. Seriously, how does this not hurt?
Watch, in this video, how America’s affectionate dad does something deeply unpatriotic: He takes a big honking bite out of his thicc scoops.
Understandably, some supporters are horrified. How could a future president mistreat his sensitive teeth like this?
However, some people are elated to see Biden represent the subculture of ice cream chewers. Joe Bitin’ simply knows the secret to actually enjoying ice cream, according to Valerie Calle, 21. “I think it tastes better [this way],” she says of biting a cold scoop. Letting a bite of ice cream melt in your mouth allows for your taste buds to process the flavors more, she believes — as long as you’re willing to put up with the occasional brain freeze.
Moreover, licking soft-serve is a waste of time and money. If the goal is to eat more of the ice cream when it’s very cold, the tongue method is simply inefficient. By the time you finish slurping a scoop, half has dripped onto the floor and the rest is staining your hands.
It’s time the rest of the country caught on. “Not a lot of people chew their ice cream, so seeing that [Biden] does it makes me happy,” Calle says.
Biden’s love for ice cream is thicker than a Culver’s concrete mixer. “I eat more ice cream than three other people you’d like to be with, all at once,” he said in 2016 while visiting the Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream headquarters (yes, there’s a conspiracy about this, too) in Columbus, Ohio. In May, some kid named Jack wrote Biden, inquiring about his favorite ice cream flavor. Biden revealed it’s chocolate chip.
To be sure, Biden’s affinity for ice cream is great marketing. It evokes a simple, down-home charm, true to his persona this election (and also to the bad-boy caricature we saw in the Onion throughout the Obama era). Biden’s not a chocolate-mousse guy or a Levain-cookie elitist. All he wants to do is sit down at a hot metal table frying in the August sun, dripping cone in hand, and tell you it’s all gonna be okay. “I get him on that level,” says Kathleen Schmidt of Toms River, New Jersey.
Before Schmidt’s father died a few years ago, they had a dad-daughter tradition: going out for a banana split sundae or rum-raisin scoop. “Watching Biden go for ice cream and be so happy about it reminds me of my dad a lot,” she tells me.
During the Biden ice cream fancam, the song “Ice Cream” by Selena Gomez and Blackpink plays in the background. The video quickly blew up on stan Twitter, where Cody Malone, an 18-year-old Biden voter in New York City, tweeted, “not joe biden promoting ice cream more than YG/interscope” (the label that let the single “Ice Cream” sink on the charts).
Even if Biden has no idea what a fancam is, this mashup of interests has been a great distraction for Malone as he waits for election results after his first time voting. ”It’s crazy two of my favorite things are combining,” he says. “[‘Ice Cream’] would’ve been such an amazing campaign song.”
Should Biden win, however, people like Matt Van Ommeren of New York want to feel represented by more than just his ice cream-chewing habits. “While I appreciate [Biden’s] effort to normalize ice cream biting, I wish he would advocate for me in more meaningful ways — like working toward establishing stronger labor protections for working-class people, pursuing truly affordable and accessible healthcare or otherwise making any positive impact on my quality of life,” he says.
In the meantime, Van Ommeren is willing to settle for a chewer-in-chief. “I’ve been criticized for biting ice cream for as long as I can remember, so there’s something comforting about Biden’s dairy consumption habits,” he says. Just make sure Biden has a Lactaid on hand.
Joseph Longo
Joseph Longo is a culture and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly and more. He's still trying to understand what it means to be a Gemini Rising.
