Food Waste Trivia
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43 free Food Waste trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
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 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01UNEP's Food Waste Index ranks households first for wasted food; which sector comes second?
Food service
Food service comes second, and when COVID-19 shut restaurants and schools in 2020, farms that supplied them destroyed millions of pounds of food they could no longer sell.
Q 02UNEP estimates that food loss and waste cause roughly what proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions?
About 10%
About 10%: part of that comes from landfills, where food decays quickly and gives off methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Q 03Food banks in the national network founded by John van Hengel bid for donated food using what internal currency?
Shares
Shares: before 2005 the network handed out food centrally, and now food banks bid shares on incoming truckloads of donations.
Q 04Which England footballer teamed up with UK surplus-food charity FareShare in March 2020?
Marcus Rashford
Marcus Rashford set an initial £100,000 target after making his own donation, and the drive went on to raise more than £20 million.
Q 05Over 100 years, methane from landfilled food traps roughly how many times more heat than carbon dioxide?
30
About 30 times: methane lasts only about a decade in the air, but it absorbs far more energy than carbon dioxide while it is there.
Q 06Which UK date label marks the last day food such as raw meat is safe to eat?
Use by
Use by marks safety and is required on food that goes off quickly, while best before only marks quality, so food past that date can still be eaten.
Q 07Which is the only food product for which US federal law actually requires a date label?
Infant formula
Infant formula must carry a date backed by tests showing it still meets its nutrient levels, while federal law requires no dates on other foods.
Q 08Which country was the first to ban supermarkets from destroying unsold food, in 2016?
France
France's 2016 law makes large supermarkets donate unsold food to charities or face fines, and it bars them from deliberately spoiling that food.
Q 09What do Britons usually call dumpster diving for food that supermarkets throw away?
Skipping
Skipping: a skip is the British word for a large rubbish container, and some supermarkets have responded by locking their bins.
Q 10What technology bills South Korean households for exactly how much food they throw away?
RFID cards
RFID cards let each household's bin weigh its scraps for billing, and South Korea sends much of its food waste to become animal feed and fertiliser.
Q 11Which app sells shops' unsold food in 'surprise bags' at about a third of the usual price?
Too Good To Go
Too Good To Go uses surprise bags so shops can hand over whatever is left at the end of the day instead of promising particular items.
Q 12Which 2015 app by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One lets neighbours give away spare food for free?
Olio
Olio lets neighbours post spare food for others to collect for free, and Tesco has used it to give away wonky fruit and other unsold stock.
Q 13In 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 21Which consumer campaign did the UK charity WRAP launch in 2007?
Love Food Hate Waste
Love Food Hate Waste later spread beyond Britain, and New Zealand launched its own version of the campaign in 2016.
Q 22The British charity WRAP is an acronym for what?
Waste & Resources Action Programme
Waste & Resources Action Programme brokered the Courtauld Commitment in 2005, a voluntary deal that got food businesses cutting packaging and food waste.
Q 23In WRAP's 2007 study of UK households, which item topped the list of avoidable food waste by weight?
Potatoes
Q 14John van Hengel opened the world's first food bank, St. Mary's, in 1967 in which US city?
Phoenix
Phoenix is where van Hengel, volunteering at a soup kitchen, had more donated food than he could hand out, and St. Mary's became the nation's first food bank.
Q 15What was John van Hengel's national food-bank network called until its 2008 renaming?
America's Second Harvest
America's Second Harvest merged with Foodchain, then the country's largest food-rescue group, in 2001, and it became Feeding America in 2008.
Q 16City Harvest, a food-rescue organisation founded in 1982, operates in which US city?
New York
New York's City Harvest began when soup-kitchen volunteer Helen Palit asked a restaurant about food it threw out, and the next day it handed over its surplus.
Q 17In which country did Johannesburg-born Ronni Kahn start a food-rescue charity in 2004?
Australia
Australia: Kahn ran an events business in Sydney, and her shock at how much food events wasted led her to found OzHarvest in 2004.
Q 18Which 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 19Which surplus food did Adnams brew into a 2018 beer range for Marks & Spencer?
Bread
Bread: the range used leftovers from M&S's sandwich makers, following Toast Ale, whose founder brews beer from bread that would be thrown away.
Q 20Selina Juul's 'Stop Wasting Food' movement helped which country cut food waste 25% from 2010 to 2015?
Denmark
Denmark: by 2016 chains such as REMA 1000 had dropped quantity discounts that tempt shoppers to overbuy, and many stores ran cheap 'stop food waste' areas.
Potatoes topped the list at 359,000 tonnes a year, and nearly half of those binned had never been touched.
Q 24Which future US president ran the WWI Food Administration that urged families to sign food-saving pledge cards?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover designed the campaign to appeal to Americans' volunteer spirit and avoid coercion, relying on patriotic appeals instead of rationing.
Q 25Which WWII campaign urged Britons to turn gardens and parks into vegetable plots?
Dig for Victory
Dig for Victory reached even the royal family, with vegetables grown at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle during the war.
Q 26The word 'freegan' is a portmanteau of 'free' and which other word?
Vegan
Vegan: freegans take vegans' boycott further, trying to buy as little as possible and living off food and goods that others throw away.
Q 27The word 'freegan' was allegedly coined in 1994 by Keith McHenry, co-founder of which activist group?
Food Not Bombs
Food Not Bombs was started in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists near Boston, and it serves free vegetarian meals as a protest against militarism.
Q 28Under which 1824 law were three London men charged in 2013 for taking discarded food from supermarket bins?
Vagrancy Act
Vagrancy Act: the charges were dropped after public criticism, and the supermarket's own boss said he had wanted the case dropped.
Q 29In 2019, two students from Olching were convicted of theft for taking food from a supermarket bin in which country?
Germany
Germany: the court let them off with a warning and a suspended fine, and in 2023 two federal ministers backed decriminalizing 'containern'.
Q 30Which 1988 Supreme Court case ruled there is no expectation of privacy in curbside trash?
California v. Greenwood
California v. Greenwood said bags left at the curb are open to 'animals, children, scavengers, snoops,' so police need no warrant to search them.