Fall Food Trivia
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59 free Fall Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
57 free Fall Food trivia questions with answers. Autumn is the one season people can taste. This quiz covers the whole harvest table: the year Starbucks first poured a pumpkin spice latte and the year it finally added pumpkin, what candy corn was originally called, why cranberry growers flood their bogs, which state grows almost half of America's pumpkins, and how many buckets of maple sap it takes to make one of syrup. It also travels: mooncakes and the Mid-Autumn Festival, songpyeon at Chuseok, pan de muerto for Dia de Muertos, chestnuts on St Martin's Day, Oktoberfest's Munich-only beer rule and Britain's treacle-black bonfire toffee. Halloween candy, caramel apples, cider doughnuts, pecan pie and Thanksgiving turkeys round it out. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for a family game night; the rest reward people who read the back of the can. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or official source, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each question.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 2003 Starbucks flavour became its top seasonal seller?
Pumpkin spice
Pumpkin spice: for its first twelve years the latte contained no pumpkin at all, and Starbucks added real pumpkin and dropped the caramel colouring only in 2015.
Q 02Which American spice company launched a ready-mixed 'pumpkin pie spice' in 1934?
McCormick
McCormick: its blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice contains no pumpkin at all; it is named for the pie it was mixed to season.
Q 03Which 1796 cookbook, the first by an author from the new United States, printed early pumpkin pie recipes?
American Cookery
American Cookery: until Amelia Simmons, the cookbooks used in America were British; hers cooked with native corn, squash and pumpkin, including a 'pompkin' pudding baked in a crust.
Q 04Which brand cans America's best-selling pumpkin, all of it pale Dickinson squash?
Libby's
Libby's: it cans so much of the country's pumpkin that when heavy rain swamped its 2009 harvest, it warned bakers of a shortage before Thanksgiving.
Q 05The record-setting pumpkin pie baked in New Bremen, Ohio, in 2010 was 20 feet across and weighed about how much?
3,700 lb
3,700 lb, or 3,699 to be exact: the New Bremen growers smashed their own earlier record of 2,020 lb with a filling of 1,212 pounds of canned pumpkin and 2,796 eggs.
Q 06Which Halloween staple, a roll of pastel tablets, is sold as 'Rockets' north of the US border?
Smarties
Smarties: founder Edward Dee moved his family from England to New Jersey in 1949 and began making them with just two machines in a rented factory.
Q 07Which Halloween sweet was once sold as 'Chicken Feed'?
Candy corn
Candy corn: it appeared when about half of Americans still worked on farms, so Goelitz pitched its kernels to them as feed fit for a rooster.
Q 08Which turkey brand runs the Turkey Talk-Line, a holiday hotline for flustered Thanksgiving cooks?
Butterball
Butterball: since 1981 its experts have spent every November and December talking callers, and now texters, through thawing and roasting the bird.
Q 09Dan Walker, credited with creating the caramel apple in the 1950s, sold for which company?
Kraft
Kraft: salesman Dan Walker is often credited with the caramel apple, yet Chicago's Affy Tapple had been selling them since 1948, before his 1950s experiment with surplus caramels.
Q 10Newark's William Kolb is said to have made the first red candy apple in 1908 while testing cinnamon candy for which holiday?
Christmas
Christmas: the story goes that Kolb dipped a few apples in the red candy, set them in his shop window and sold the whole first batch at five cents each.
Q 11In Britain, toffee apples are eaten at Halloween and at which other autumn celebration?
Bonfire Night
Bonfire Night, 5 November: like Halloween, it falls just after the apple harvest, which is why apples dipped in hard toffee became the treat of both nights.
Q 12Which ingredient gives the British sweet known as plot toffee its slightly bitter flavour?
Black treacle
Black treacle is less sweet than sugar, hence the bitter edge; the brittle toffee was long made at home in big sheets and smashed into pieces with a small toffee hammer.
Q 13Why does flooding cranberry beds with six to eight inches of water work as a 'wet harvest'?
The ripe berries float
Q 21Which Canadian province produces roughly 70% of the world's maple syrup?
Quebec
Quebec: its producers keep a strategic reserve of syrup to steady prices, and in 2011 and 2012 thieves drained about C$18 million worth from one of its warehouses.
Q 22Which state has long been the largest maple syrup producer in the United States?
Vermont
Vermont makes about half of America's syrup; at its sugar-on-snow parties the hot syrup is poured over snow and eaten with sour dill pickles to cut the sweetness.
Q 23Roughly how many gallons of maple sap must be boiled down to make one gallon of syrup?
About 40
About 40, or anywhere from 20 to 50 depending on the tree: sap is only two to five per cent sugar, so nearly all of it has to be boiled away.
The ripe berries float: a machine churns through the flooded bed to beat them off the vines, and the bobbing fruit is corralled into a corner and pumped out.
Q 14Which Midwestern state grows about 60% of America's cranberries?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin: the vines thrive in its sandy bogs, and about 250 growers there now out-harvest every other state combined; the cranberry is the official state fruit.
Q 15Which grower-owned cooperative, founded in 1930, markets most of North America's cranberries?
Ocean Spray
Ocean Spray: its three founding growers chose a cooperative partly because the form shielded them from antitrust law, and it grew to handle about two-thirds of the crop.
Q 16Only about 5% of the US cranberry crop reaches shoppers in which form?
Fresh
Fresh: raw cranberries are hard, sour and bitter, so about 95% of the crop is processed, and fruit for the fresh market has to be picked dry to avoid bruising.
Q 17Which syrup brand helped popularise pecan pie with a 1930s recipe?
Karo
Karo: its makers pushed the recipe to sell more corn syrup, and the brand says the recipe is still called Karo pie; Texas named pecan pie its official state pie in 2013.
Q 18Mooncakes are traditionally eaten during which Chinese celebration?
Mid-Autumn Festival
Mid-Autumn Festival: the dense cakes are cut into small wedges and shared with tea, and businesses give boxes of them to clients as presents.
Q 19In a traditional lotus-seed mooncake, which ingredient at the centre stands for the full moon?
Salted egg yolk
Salted egg yolk: a whole duck-egg yolk is baked into the sweet lotus paste, so that every wedge cut from the cake shows a slice of golden moon.
Q 20In legend, notes hidden in mooncakes helped rebels topple which dynasty, clearing the way for the Ming?
Yuan
Yuan: in the folk tale, rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang and his adviser hid the date of their rising inside the cakes to slip it past China's Mongol rulers.
Q 24A 1925 Connecticut newspaper described members of which organisation eating 'Some-mores'?
The Girl Scouts
The Girl Scouts: their 1927 handbook printed the recipe as 'Some More', and within a decade or so campers had slurred the name into s'more.
Q 25Which country holds its Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October?
Canada
Canada fixed the date only in 1957; in the 1920s its Thanksgiving shared a November Monday with Armistice Day, until the two were split in 1931.
Q 26Which vegetable was traditionally carved into Halloween lanterns in Ireland and Scotland before pumpkins?
Turnip
Turnips were hollowed out and carved with faces in Ireland and Scotland; emigrants to America switched to the native pumpkin, which is softer, far larger and easier to carve.
Q 27Sharing medieval 'soul cakes' at Allhallowtide is a suggested origin of which Halloween practice?
Trick-or-treating
Souling, in which children and the poor went door to door for small spiced soul cakes in return for prayers for the dead, is a suggested ancestor of trick-or-treating.
Q 28In Portugal, chestnuts are roasted over bonfires on 11 November, which saint's day, honouring a soldier who shared his cloak?
St Martin's Day
St Martin's Day is the best-known date for Portugal's magusto: families roast chestnuts in the embers and taste the year's new wine or the sweet, fortified jeropiga.
Q 29Chestnut blight, first noticed in New York in 1904, went on to kill roughly how many American chestnut trees?
4 billion
About 4 billion American chestnuts died within a few decades, wiping out what had been one of the dominant hardwoods of the eastern forests.
Q 30Unlike the sweet chestnuts you roast, the 'conkers' of the horse chestnut tree are what?
Mildly poisonous
Mildly poisonous: the horse chestnut is no relation of the sweet chestnut, and its bitter seeds are prized in Britain only for the playground game of conkers.