


National Donut Day is celebrated on the first Friday of June to commemorate the donuts Salvation Army volunteers served to American soldiers in France during World War I. Not to say all food holidays are apocryphal. “She could have started it, got her neighbors involved with it, and they could have told their friends, and their friends.…” “A lady down the street started it 60 years ago because she liked that kind of food,” Anderson says. The programmer and blogger Jesse Avshalomov discovered this in 2007 when he founded International Beer Day on a lark-an “experiment in virality,” he claims, “gone horribly right.” Anderson says that a significant number of of food holidays have obscure and unverifiable beginnings, likely because they can be launched by anyone. “I just got lucky,” Hopkins tells me.Īlice Anderson, one of the owners of the National Day Calendar, a website that calls itself the “authoritative source” for “fun” and “unusual” national days, says “we’ll probably never find the origin of some of these food days.” Why? Because there’s no fixed, regulated process required to create one.

Given these creative liberties, why is his site the one Google uses for its searches? No reason. Hopkins himself is known for arbitrarily making up food holidays, oddities like National Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day (November 12) and National Tater Tot Day (February 2). In fact, many of these food holidays have dubious origins that are all but impossible to track down-not least in part because anyone can come up with one. This discrepancy highlights an important point: There really is no definitive list for the “national” days celebrating food, and there’s no easy way to verify them. But John-Bryan Hopkins, the writer behind Foodimentary-the calendar Google relies on to create the official-looking banners that appear alongside food holiday searches- says that there are at least 500 of them. According to National Today, a website that tracks special holidays across the world, the United States is home to at least 210 distinct food holidays. Despite the official-sounding titles of holidays like National Watermelon Day (August 3) and National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (August 4), it’s not clear how many food holidays there really are-and there’s no easy way to determine which ones are legitimate.
