Food Trivia for Kids
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8correct to beat the crowd
This is food and drink trivia for kids: 99 free questions with answers built for children rather than for grown-ups who happen to be eating. Every question can be worked out by an eight-to-twelve-year-old who has been to a supermarket, and the answers are the kind of fact kids repeat at school the next day: peanuts ripen underground, a banana is technically a berry, cotton candy was co-invented by a dentist, and root beer was once flavoured with tree bark. The questions cover fruits and vegetables, dairy, bread and baking, sweets, pasta and a few animals that turn up on the table, plus a round of drinks: tea, hot chocolate, orange juice, milk, lemonade, bubble tea, root beer, sodas and smoothies. There is nothing scary, nothing adult, and no trick wording, just four options, one right answer and a short explanation that adds something worth knowing. Every answer here was checked against a primary reference such as an encyclopaedia entry or an official source before it was published, so the facts you hand your class or your car full of children are facts. Play it on a phone, read it aloud at dinner, or print the answers and run it as a party round.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of these is the main ingredient in ketchup?
Tomatoes
Tomatoes only joined ketchup in the early 1800s; before that, British cooks made their ketchups from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies.
Q 02Which insects make honey?
Bees
Bees turn watery flower nectar into honey by fanning it with their wings until most of the water has evaporated, then seal each cell of the comb with a wax cap.
Q 03Which spicy sausage is sliced into thin red rounds as a favourite topping on American pizzas?
Pepperoni
Pepperoni is an American creation, unknown in Italy, where the similar word 'peperoni' means bell peppers, so ordering it there gets you a pizza covered in vegetables.
Q 04Granny Smith, Gala and Fuji are all varieties of which fruit?
Apples
Apples: the Granny Smith is named after Maria Ann Smith, who is said to have found the first seedling in 1868 beside a creek on her farm near Sydney, sprung from leftover crab-apples.
Q 05Which fruit is the main ingredient in guacamole?
Avocado
Avocado is mashed with salt and usually lime juice, and the lime is there for more than flavour: its acid slows the reaction with air that turns cut avocado brown.
Q 06Sushi is a traditional dish from which country?
Japan
Japan's sushi grew out of an old way of keeping fish from spoiling by packing it in salted, fermenting rice; at first the rice was thrown away and only the fish was eaten.
Q 07Which vegetable is famous for making your eyes water when you chop it?
Onion
Onion: slicing breaks its cells and sets off a reaction that releases a stinging gas; in 2008 scientists in New Zealand switched off the gene behind it and grew onions that cause no tears.
Q 08Tree sap is boiled down to make which sweet topping for pancakes?
Maple syrup
Maple syrup starts as watery sap that is only about 2 to 3 per cent sugar, so dozens of litres have to be boiled down to make a single litre of syrup.
Q 09Which vegetable is used to make French fries?
Potatoes
Potatoes cut into strips make the crispest fries when they are fried twice: a first, cooler bath of oil cooks them through, and a second, hotter one browns the outside.
Q 10A raisin is which fruit after it has been dried?
A grape
A grape dried in the sun or in an oven becomes a raisin, and the word itself is simply the Old French for grape; a dried plum, by the way, is a prune.
Q 11Vanilla comes from which kind of flower?
An orchid
An orchid: each vanilla flower opens for only about a day, so growers pollinate every one by hand, using a method worked out in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion.
Q 12Tacos are a traditional food from which country?
Mexico
Mexico's tacos al pastor were shaped by Lebanese immigrants, who brought spit-roasted shawarma with them; their children swapped the lamb for pork and added a chilli marinade.
Q 13Where does a pineapple grow?
On a low, leafy plant
On a low, leafy plant about as tall as a child: each plant normally bears one pineapple, which is really many small fruits from separate flowers fused together into one.
Q 21Which English nobleman gave his name to a filling served between two slices of bread?
The Earl of Sandwich
The Earl of Sandwich: John Montagu, the 4th Earl, held the title in the 1700s and reputedly ate meat between bread so he could stay at the card table. The title comes from Sandwich in Kent.
Q 22What makes the famous holes in a wheel of Swiss cheese?
Gas made by bacteria
Gas made by bacteria fills the holes, and in 2015 Swiss researchers found the bubbles start around tiny specks of hay dust in the milk, which is why cleaner modern milking was making the holes shrink.
Q 23Watermelon belongs to the same plant family as which of these?
Pumpkin
Q 14Hummus is a dip made mainly from which food?
Chickpeas
Chickpeas give the dip its name as well as its body: hummus is simply the Arabic word for chickpeas, and the full Arabic name means chickpeas with tahini.
Q 15Which grain has kernels that burst into a fluffy white snack when heated?
Corn
Popcorn is a special variety of corn kernel. Heat turns the moisture inside each kernel to steam until it pops open.
Q 16Peanuts are unusual because their pods ripen in what place?
Underground
Underground: the flower stalk bends down and pushes the young pod into the soil, a trick botanists call geocarpy, which is why peanuts are dug up rather than picked.
Q 17Botanically speaking, a banana counts as which kind of fruit?
A berry
Botanically a banana is a berry: a fleshy fruit that develops from a single flower's ovary with the seeds inside the pulp. The banana plant itself is a giant herb, not a tree.
Q 18The tiny specks on the outside of which fruit are each a separate little fruit with its own seed?
Strawberry
Strawberry: each speck is an achene, a tiny dry fruit holding a single seed, and the juicy red part is really the swollen tip of the flower stalk.
Q 19Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by John C. Wharton and a partner who worked in which job?
A dentist
A dentist, William Morrison, built the electric spinning machine with confectioner John C. Wharton, and in 1921 another dentist, Joseph Lascaux, patented a rival machine and gave the treat the name cotton candy.
Q 20Cotton candy was sold at the 1904 St. Louis exposition under what name, still used in Australia?
Fairy Floss
Fairy Floss was its makers' name for it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where they sold 68,655 boxes at 25 cents each; Americans only began calling it cotton candy in the 1920s.
Pumpkin: both are gourds, a family that also takes in squashes and melons, which is why a watermelon plant sprawls along the ground just as a pumpkin patch does.
Q 24Butter is made by churning which ingredient until its fat clumps together?
Cream
Cream is churned until the membranes around its fat globules break and the fat clumps together into butter. The watery liquid left behind is buttermilk.
Q 25The Italian word 'spaghetti' means what?
Little strings
Little strings: spaghetti is the plural of spaghetto, from 'spago', Italian for string or cord. In 1957 the BBC fooled many viewers with an April Fools' film of Swiss farmers picking spaghetti from trees.
Q 26Carrots are packed with beta-carotene, which an enzyme in the small intestine converts into which vitamin?
Vitamin A
Vitamin A helps eyes work in dim light, and in World War II British propaganda stretched that into a tale that carrots let pilots see in the dark, when their real help was radar.
Q 27The first carrots farmed in Persia about 1,000 years ago were usually which colours?
Purple or yellow
Purple or yellow were the colours of the first farmed carrots; the orange kind we know today was only developed centuries later, by growers in the Netherlands.
Q 28Yeast makes bread dough rise by turning the sugars in the dough into bubbles of which gas?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide from the yeast feeding on sugars gets trapped by stretchy gluten, and the same gas puts the fizz in a soda.
Q 29A dill pickle starts life as which vegetable before it is soaked in brine or vinegar?
A cucumber
A cucumber left in salty water long enough turns sour all by itself, as bacteria living on its skin ferment it; in Britain a small pickled one is called a gherkin.
Q 30One egg from which bird holds about as much as two dozen hen's eggs?
The ostrich
The ostrich lays the largest egg of any living bird, around 1.4 kg, yet for a bird of her size it is surprisingly small: only a few per cent of the mother's own weight.