50 free food waste trivia questions with answers. How much of the world's food never gets eaten, and where does it go? This food waste trivia quiz covers the whole chain: UNEP and FAO figures on how much is lost and wasted, the methane it makes in landfill, the difference between best-before and use-by dates, and the laws that try to fix it, from France's 2016 supermarket ban to South Korea's pay-by-the-bag bins. Along the way you'll meet the people and campaigns: the first food bank in Phoenix, Too Good To Go's surprise bags, ugly-produce start-ups, wartime 'meatless Mondays', Potato Pete, freegans and dumpster divers, and the archaeologist who made a career out of digging through household trash. It suits a sustainability class, a pub quiz round, or anyone who has ever felt guilty about a forgotten bag of salad. Roughly a third of the questions are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who know their compost from their bokashi. Every answer has been verified against primary sources, mostly UN, EPA and Wikipedia pages, and each explanation adds one extra fact worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Per UNEP's 2021 Food Waste Index, roughly what share of the world's food waste came from households?
61%
The same report put food service at 26 percent and retail at just 13 percent, so the biggest bin is the one in your kitchen.
Q 02The UN estimates food loss and waste generate what share of global greenhouse gas emissions?
8 to 10 percent
That is more than the entire aviation industry, which is one reason wasted food ranks high on climate to-do lists.
Q 03The UN says households worldwide throw away edible food equivalent to how many meals every single day?
Over 1 billion
That works out to about 1.3 meals a day for every person on Earth affected by hunger.
Q 04The US EPA estimates what share of methane escaping municipal landfills comes from buried food scraps?
58%
Food breaks down fast and without oxygen underground, which is exactly the recipe for methane rather than harmless compost.
Q 05Over 100 years, methane from rotting landfill food traps roughly how many times more heat than carbon dioxide?
27
Methane only lingers for about a decade, but it punches far above its weight while it is there.
Q 06Which date label goes on milk and meat because they can become dangerous once it passes?
Use by
Best-before dates are about quality, not safety, so a biscuit past its date is merely stale rather than risky.
Q 07Which is the only food product for which US federal law actually requires a date label?
Infant formula
Every other date you see on American groceries is voluntary, which is why the wording varies so wildly from brand to brand.
Q 08Which country was the first to ban supermarkets from destroying unsold food, in 2016?
France
Instead of binning surplus, large stores are expected to donate it to charities and food banks.
Q 09In which year did South Korea introduce its volume-based waste fee system?
1995
Within a decade, waste generation had fallen and recycling rates had climbed sharply.
Q 10What technology bills South Korean households for exactly how much food they throw away?
RFID cards
Since 2005 the country has also banned food scraps from landfill entirely, sending them to feed and fertiliser instead.
Q 11Too Good To Go's 'surprise bag' of unsold food is priced at roughly what fraction of its original value?
One-third
You never get to choose what is inside, and the shop can cancel if the expected leftovers never materialise.
Q 12Which 2015 app by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One lets neighbours give away spare food for free?
Olio
Several UK supermarket chains have piloted it as a kind of online food bank for their unsold stock.
Q 13What was the name of the Milan campaign that encouraged shoppers to buy misshapen fruit and vegetables?
Frutta Brutta
North of the Alps a similar push ran under the banner 'Fruits et legumes moches', literally 'ugly fruit and veg'.
Q 21Selina Juul's 'Stop Wasting Food' movement helped which country cut food waste 25% from 2010 to 2015?
Denmark
The volunteer-run group was founded in 2008 and has no permanent membership.
Q 22Which consumer campaign did the UK charity WRAP launch in 2007?
Love Food Hate Waste
Within two years it claimed to have helped two million households and kept 137,000 tonnes out of the bin.
Q 23The British charity WRAP is an acronym for what?
Waste & Resources Action Programme
It has worked with UNEP and the FAO on a global measurement tool for the UN's Think.Eat.Save initiative.
Q 14In 2022, the ugly-produce delivery service Misfits Market announced it was acquiring which rival?
Imperfect Foods
Both companies built subscription boxes around fruit and vegetables that failed supermarket cosmetic standards.
Q 15John van Hengel opened the world's first food bank, St. Mary's, in 1967 in which US city?
Phoenix
He got the idea from a mother of ten who was feeding her family from a 'bank' of edible food behind grocery stores.
Q 16What was John van Hengel's national food-bank network, renamed in 2008, originally called?
America's Second Harvest
It now runs an internal market where food banks bid with a synthetic currency called 'shares' for donated goods.
Q 17City Harvest, a food-rescue organisation founded in 1982, operates in which US city?
New York
Fresh fruit and vegetables make up more than half of everything it rescues.
Q 18OzHarvest, the food-rescue charity founded by Ronni Kahn in 2004, operates in which country?
Australia
Kahn's lobbying changed liability laws in four states so that donors could hand over surplus food without fear of being sued.
Q 19Which campaigner staged 'Feeding the 5000' in Trafalgar Square in 2009 with food that would have been binned?
Tristram Stuart
The event model has since been replicated in cities around the world by his charity Feedback.
Q 20Toast Ale, launched in 2016, brews beer using which surplus food from the catering trade?
Bread
The recipe is open source, and Marks & Spencer later had Adnams brew a range from its sandwich suppliers' offcuts.
Q 24In WRAP's landmark 2007 study of UK households, which item topped the list of avoidable food waste by weight?
Potatoes
Nearly half of the 359,000 tonnes binned each year had never even been touched.
Q 25The WWI US Food Administration urged 'meatless Mondays' and 'wheatless' which other day?
Wednesdays
The agency had almost no enforcement power and relied on patriotic appeals rather than formal rationing.
Q 26Which future president ran the US Food Administration in WWI, lending his name to 'Hooverizing'?
Herbert Hoover
He hated the nickname and repeatedly ordered publicists not to mention him by name.
Q 27Under Britain's 1916 wartime rules, restaurant lunches were capped at how many courses?
Two
Dinner was capped at three, and you could be fined for feeding the pigeons.
Q 28Which Ministry of Food cartoon character urged wartime Britons to eat more of a home-grown root crop?
Potato Pete
Lord Woolton's ministry also pushed the meatless 'Woolton pie' of carrots, parsnips and turnips under a pastry crust.
Q 29In 1943, San Francisco cafes handed out cartons for carrying leftovers home under what name?
Pet Pakits
The 'doggy bag' euphemism only really took off through newspaper etiquette columns in the 1970s.
Q 30The word 'freegan' is a portmanteau of 'free' and which other word?
Vegan
Freegans extend the boycott logic beyond animal products to buying anything at all, living instead off what others discard.