Eat an Extra Dessert Day is for the second slice, the one most people talk themselves out of. Have it after dinner, or on its own in the middle of the afternoon, and take your time with it.
No founder, organization or establishing record has been identified for Eat an Extra Dessert Day in any source opened for this page. Its earliest surviving trace is a calendar listing captured by the Internet Archive in August 2015, which dates that listing rather than the day, and which says in its own words that it is unclear who created it.
Read down a list of novelty food holidays and you get a parade of dishes. Chocolate Cake Day falls in January. Vanilla Ice Cream Day is in July, and Cake Day lands in November.
Eat an Extra Dessert Day names no dish at all. The fun-holiday calendar at timeanddate.com carries 426 named days, and this is the only one whose name asks for extra.
What it grants is not a flavor but a second helping. Most food days ask you to try something new, while this one asks for more of what you were already having. No one has claimed credit for it in any record found.
DEALS & OFFERS
Eat an Extra Dessert Day ran on September 4. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
Dessert is, by construction, the part that comes after the meal is finished. The French word is first recorded in 1393, as desserte, meaning the last service of the meal, and it is built on the verb desservir.
Which leaves a question hanging over a day like this one. If dessert is already the course that arrives once everything else is done, what is an extra one extra to?
The United States answered that in writing. The 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans gave the leftover space a formal name, the discretionary calorie allowance: the balance of calories left in a day once recommended nutrient intakes had been met from low-fat, no-added-sugar foods.
The same document was careful about who the allowance was for. The same document adds that those trying to lose weight may choose not to use discretionary calories. The room was there, and using it was optional.
The phrase did not last. The eighth edition, published in 2015, does not contain it anywhere. In its place sits a limit on calories for other uses.
The current edition keeps that wording and puts the figure at 240 calories a day in its 2,000-calorie Healthy U.S.-Style pattern. An allowance is something you are granted. A limit is something you approach.
Against all that federal precision, the day itself has no paperwork that anyone has found. The phrase turns up in none of the Chase's Calendar of Events volumes HathiTrust indexes.
Novelty days do sometimes have authors. Thomas and Ruth Roy have published more than eighty of them under the Wellcat Holidays name, and say those were originally printed in Chase's Calendar of Events. Their own list, which finds room for Bathtub Party Day and Fish Tank Floorshow Night, contains no dessert day at all.
What survives instead is a calendar listing captured on August 6, 2015, already fixed to September 4, already saying it is unclear who created the day. The instruction outlived whoever wrote it.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Feeling guilty about cake predicted less control, not more resolve.
A 2014 study in the journal Appetite sorted people by whether chocolate cake made them think first of guilt or of celebration, then compared their attitudes to healthy eating and their weight change over eighteen months. The guilt group reported lower perceived behavioural control over their eating, and the authors wrote that they found nothing to support the idea that guilt is adaptive or motivating.
A survey of adults and students in four countries, published in 1999, found Americans at the health extreme and the French at the pleasure extreme in how food figures in their lives. The same paper noted that Americans, who do the most to alter their diet in the service of health, were the least likely to call themselves healthy eaters.
In June 2022 Promotional Products Association International printed the date for its members as a marketing slot, under the heading Plan For This Promo. Nothing Bundt Cakes runs a product page built around the day, telling customers to go ahead and have that second or third dessert.
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No. It is an unofficial observance, and no proclamation or statute for it was located in the records checked, so September 4 is an ordinary working day.
COLOPHON
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