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
Tomato ketchup is made from tomatoes mixed with sugar and vinegar, plus seasonings and spices.
Q 02Which insects make honey?
Bees
Honey is made by several species of bees, and the best known of them are honey bees.
Q 03Pizza is a dish that comes from which country?
Italy
Pizza is an Italian dish: a flat base of wheat dough topped with tomato and cheese, then baked at a very high temperature.
Q 04Chocolate is made from the roasted beans of which plant?
Cacao
Cocoa beans are the seeds of the cacao tree. They are roasted and ground up to make chocolate.
Q 05Which fruit is the main ingredient in guacamole?
Avocado
Guacamole is an avocado-based dip that was first made in Mexico. Lime juice is often stirred in, but the avocado is the main part.
Q 06Sushi is a traditional dish from which country?
Japan
Sushi is a traditional Japanese dish built around rice seasoned with vinegar, sugar and salt, combined with fish, vegetables or other ingredients.
Q 07Cheese is made from which of these?
Milk
Cheese is a dairy product made by curdling the milk protein casein, which makes the milk thicken into solid curds.
Q 08Tree sap is boiled down to make which sweet topping for pancakes?
Maple syrup
Maple syrup is made by boiling the watery sap of maple trees until it turns thick and sweet. Canada makes more than three quarters of the world's supply.
Q 09Which vegetable is used to make French fries?
Potatoes
French fries are strips of potato that have been deep fried until they are crisp on the outside.
Q 10A raisin is which fruit after it has been dried?
A grape
A raisin is simply a dried grape. A dried plum, by the way, is a prune.
Q 11Vanilla comes from which kind of flower?
An orchid
Vanilla is a spice taken from the seed pods of orchids in the genus Vanilla, which grow in Mexico and Central America.
Q 12Tacos are a traditional food from which country?
Mexico
A taco is a traditional Mexican dish made with a small hand-sized tortilla of corn or wheat, folded around a filling.
Q 13Where does a pineapple grow?
On a low, leafy plant
The pineapple is a small shrubby plant that only reaches about three to five feet tall, and a single fruit grows from the middle of its spiky leaves.
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: Propionibacterium feed on lactic acid in the cheese and release carbon dioxide, which collects as bubbles that become the eyes. Tiny specks of hay dust in the milk give the bubbles a place to start.
Q 23How much of a watermelon's flesh is simply water?
91%
Q 14Hummus is a dip made mainly from which food?
Chickpeas
Hummus is made from cooked, mashed chickpeas blended with tahini, lemon juice and garlic.
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 18Each tiny speck on the outside of a strawberry is really a small fruit with a seed inside, called what?
An achene
An achene is each of the roughly 200 'seeds' on a strawberry, each a tiny fruit holding one seed, which is why a strawberry is not a true berry at all.
Q 19Machine-spun cotton candy was invented in 1897 by John C. Wharton and a partner who worked in which job?
A dentist
William Morrison was a dentist; with confectioner John C. Wharton he patented an electric machine that spun sugar into fluff. At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair they sold 68,655 boxes.
Q 20Spun sugar was sold to crowds at the 1904 World's Fair under what sweet-sounding name?
Fairy Floss
Fairy Floss was the name used at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where 68,655 boxes sold at 25 cents each. Australians kept the name for cotton candy.
About 91% of watermelon flesh is water and only about 6% is sugar, which is why a slice cools you down more than it fills you up. The plant is a cousin of the cucumber and the pumpkin.
Q 24Butter is made by churning which dairy ingredient until the 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
It is a plural little-version of 'spago', the Italian word for string. Italian pasta names are usually pictures like this: 'farfalle' means butterflies.
Q 26Carrots are packed with beta-carotene, which an enzyme in the small intestine converts into which vitamin?
Vitamin A
Vitamin A is what beta-carotene becomes, and it helps your eyes work in dim light, which is where the old carrot-and-night-vision story comes from.
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 original Eastern carrot domesticated in Persia around the 10th century; orange carrots came much later, bred by Dutch growers in the 1600s.
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 soaked in brine or vinegar becomes a pickle; small pickled cucumbers are called gherkins in Britain. Left in salty water long enough, they sour on their own through natural fermentation.
Q 30Which bird lays the biggest eggs of any land animal alive today?
The ostrich
The ostrich is also the heaviest and tallest bird on Earth and cannot fly at all; one of its eggs weighs about as much as two dozen chicken eggs.