Would Santa eat corn? If this time-tested symbol of Christmas were real, could get a hold of some corn, and knew how to cook it, would he eat it?

To answer that question we must first ask ourselves if Santa even eats. And that is simple — he does. He drinks our milk and eats our cookies left out on Christmas night in exchange for presents (a fair capitalist exchange; Santa may wear red but he’s no communist). Humans eat for one of two reasons: sustenance and pleasure.

Why does Santa eat? Thanks to Kiri Tannenbaum (the name’s a little on the nose) and this wonderful article we learn that Santa consumes just shy of 40 billion calories worth of cookies every Christmas night. Dividing by 365 days a year, we get that Santa eats the equivalent of 100 million calories per day — much more than he needs (unless Santa’s magic somehow needs to take advantage of cellular metabolism). With this large calorie surplus from only one night it’s clear that Santa, eating in any other context, would do so only for pleasure.

Santa would only eat corn if he liked it. So, to answer our original question we must ask ourselves: does Santa like corn?

Somehow, we find that Santa lives in a Finnish town of Rovaniemi at the edge of the Arctic Circle and eats dinner on Christmas Eve before he embarks on his annual quest to deliver presents. We can only assume that these facts are indeed true and we are not victims of some clever Finnish propaganda. James Brennan insists that Santa eats a variety of traditional Finnish foods. If we take what Mr. Brennan says to be true, then we can assume that Santa Claus will have similar tastes as a native of Finland.

Do Finnish people eat corn? Four of the fourteen traditional Finnish recipes at finland.fi  include the use of cornflour. Using ctrl+f on the Wikipedia page about Finnish cuisine only one item appears — the Finnish eat cornflakes for breakfast sometimes. The Finnish, and therefore Santa, are definitely not strangers to corn. This leads us to the fact that Santa has tried corn before, either because it was a part of his Finnish culture or because he is centuries old is is likely to have come by corn once in his lifetime.

If Santa has eaten corn before, but doesn’t request corn during Christmas night quest or eat it during his traditional Christmas Eve dinner, then we can assume that Santa doesn’t like corn.

Santa would not eat corn.