60 free Fall Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year did Starbucks first sell the Pumpkin Spice Latte?
2003
The drink was developed in January 2003 and reached every US Starbucks the following year; the PSL abbreviation was trademarked in 2015.
Q 02The Pumpkin Spice Latte had no pumpkin for its first twelve years. In which year was real pumpkin added?
2015
By then Starbucks had already sold more than 200 million of them, and Forbes put the drink's revenue at around $100 million that year.
Q 03A 1947 voluntary rationing campaign for which ingredient asked Americans to skip pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving?
Eggs
The custard-style pie needs eggs, and the postwar campaign asked households to cut back on them. The modern recipe had appeared in the 1796 cookbook American Cookery.
Q 04Libby's, the best-selling canned pumpkin brand, uses only which variety of squash?
Dickinson
Dickinson is a tan, oblong Cucurbita moschata that looks nothing like a Halloween pumpkin. Fresh pie bakers usually reach for small sugar pumpkins instead.
Q 05Roughly how much did the world's largest pumpkin pie, baked at Ohio's New Bremen Pumpkinfest in 2010, weigh?
3,699 lb
It measured 20 feet across. The competitive-eating record for pumpkin pie belongs to Molly Schuyler: 50 slices in 10 minutes.
Q 06Candy corn was invented in the 1880s by George Renninger, an employee of which confectioner?
Wunderle
Wunderle put it into production in 1888; the Goelitz Confectionery Company, now Jelly Belly, took it up a decade later and still makes it.
Q 07What was candy corn's original name?
Chicken Feed
The tricolour of yellow, orange and white was meant to evoke the fall harvest, and the name pitched it to a largely rural, farming America.
Q 08The National Confectioners Association designated which date National Candy Corn Day?
October 30
That is the day before Halloween. As of 2016 US makers were turning out about 35 million pounds, or almost 9 billion kernels, a year.
Q 09Hunter's Candy began selling the first caramel apples in 1936 in Moscow, a town in which US state?
Idaho
Hard-shell candy apples were decades old by then; the soft caramel coating was Hunter's twist, and the apples were later shipped to soldiers overseas during World War II.
Q 10William W. Kolb invented the red candy apple in 1908 in his candy shop in which city?
Newark, New Jersey
Kolb dipped apples in a red cinnamon candy he was experimenting with and put them in the window as a display; they sold out.
Q 11In Britain, toffee apples are eaten at Halloween and at which other autumn celebration?
Bonfire Night
Toffee apples were being sold in London by the 1890s. In Australia the Granny Smith is considered the ideal apple for them.
Q 12Which ingredient gives Bonfire Night plot toffee its slightly bitter flavour?
Black treacle
It goes by treacle toffee, Tom Trot and, in Scotland, claggum. It stays most popular in northern Britain, where darker sweets sell best.
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 about 72% of the world's maple syrup?
Quebec
Quebec's producers hold a strategic reserve of syrup, and there is a black-market trade in the province's product.
Q 22Which state has long been the largest maple syrup producer in the United States?
Vermont
It set a record of 2.5 million gallons in 2022, and its 2001 state quarter shows sap being collected.
Q 23Roughly how many volumes of maple sap must be boiled down to make one volume of syrup?
20 to 50
The sap only runs when days are above freezing and nights below, which is why the season is so short.
Once loosened, the floating fruit is corralled into a corner and pumped out. Most cranberries never reach shops fresh; about 95% are processed.
Q 14Which state is by far the largest cranberry producer in the United States?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin grows around 59% of the US crop, well ahead of Massachusetts, the state most people associate with the fruit.
Q 15The word 'cranberry' comes from a Low German term likening the plant's flower to the head of which bird?
Crane
The flower and stem were thought to resemble a crane's head and neck. The missionary John Eliot first used the English form in 1647.
Q 16Roughly what proportion of the cranberry crop is processed rather than sold fresh?
95%
The United States and its northern neighbour together grow about 99% of the world's cranberries, and the Ocean Spray cooperative controls roughly two-thirds of the North American industry.
Q 17Which state's legislature designated pecan pie its official state pie in 2013?
Texas
The earliest known recipe is a pecan custard pie in Harper's Bazaar in 1886, and the makers of Karo corn syrup did more than anyone to popularise the dish.
Q 18Mooncakes are traditionally eaten during which Chinese celebration?
Mid-Autumn Festival
Traditional mooncakes carry an imprint of the characters for 'longevity' or 'harmony'; chilled snow-skin versions only appeared in the early 1980s.
Q 19In a traditional lotus-seed mooncake, what does the salted duck egg yolk at the centre symbolise?
The full moon
Lotus seed paste is considered by some the original and most luxurious filling; the yolk is often doubled or quadrupled in premium cakes.
Q 20Legend says mooncakes hid messages that helped rebels overthrow which Mongol-led dynasty?
Yuan
The message supposedly read: on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, kill the rulers. The Ming dynasty followed.
Q 24A 1925 Connecticut newspaper described members of which organisation eating 'Some-mores'?
The Girl Scouts
By the end of the 1920s 'some more' had been contracted to 's'mores'. The treat's ancestor was the Marshmallow Marguerite, buttered marshmallow on a saltine.
Q 25The earliest known printed 'trick or treat', in 1917, appeared in a newspaper in which country?
Canada
It was The Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. The practice did not become widespread in North America until the 1930s.
Q 26Which vegetable was traditionally carved into Halloween lanterns in Ireland and Scotland before pumpkins?
Turnip
The pumpkin is both much softer and much larger, which is why the tradition changed so quickly in the New World.
Q 27In Ireland, small items such as a ring were traditionally hidden in which Halloween fruit bread?
Barmbrack
Whoever found the ring was said to be next to marry. Items were also hidden in colcannon and cranachan.
Q 28Sharing medieval 'soul cakes' at Allhallowtide is a suggested origin of which Halloween practice?
Trick-or-treating
Children and the poor went 'souling' door to door, receiving the small spiced cakes in exchange for prayers for the dead.
Q 29In Portugal it is traditional to eat roasted chestnuts on which saint's day, celebrated on 11 November?
St Martin's Day
China grows by far the most chestnuts in the world today, around 1.5 million tonnes a year.
Q 30Within about 40 years, chestnut blight had killed roughly how many American chestnuts?
4 billion
The tree had been a dominant hardwood of the eastern forests; efforts to breed a blight-resistant hybrid continue.