Kosher Food Trivia
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49 free Kosher Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Kosher food trivia starts with the words themselves: what kosher and treif mean, which books of the Torah the rules come from, and why nobody agrees on the reason for them. Then the animals: cloven hooves and cud, why the pig and the camel both fail, fins and scales, why sturgeon and catfish are out, the only kosher invertebrate, the turkey exception and the giraffe ruling of 2008. The quiz covers shechita and the shochet's knife, salting and the liver, Jacob's sciatic nerve, the missing hindquarters, and glatt lungs. The second half moves into the kitchen and the shop: the kid in its mother's milk, six hours between meat and dairy, fleishig and milchig dishes and when they were invented, pareve eggs and gelatin, hechsher symbols from a 6th-century menorah stamp to the Orthodox Union and the Big Five, mevushal wine and Concord grapes, four cups at the Seder, chametz, kitniyot and the candle-lit search, Sephardi glassware, kosher salt's TV career, Hebrew National's slogan, the $40 billion American market, female IDF supervisors and the one-in-sixty rule for GM salmon. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on kashrut, kosher foods, hechshers, shechita, kosher wine, kosher salt and Passover, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone curious; the expert tier reaches David Macht's lupin seedlings and the word dores.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the word 'kosher' literally mean?
Fit
Fit: the Hebrew kasher means fit or proper, which is why English slang later borrowed 'kosher' for anything legitimate or above board.
Q 02What is the Yiddish-derived word for non-kosher food?
Treif
Treif comes from the Hebrew for 'torn': the Torah forbids meat from an animal torn by wild beasts, and the word stretched to cover all non-kosher food.
Q 03Which two books of the Torah supply most of the basic laws of kashrut?
Leviticus and Deuteronomy
Leviticus and Deuteronomy list the permitted animals but give no reasons for most of the rules, so some scholars class the food laws as chukim, decrees kept without explanation.
Q 04Which of these animals is kosher because it has split hooves and chews the cud?
Deer
Deer pass both tests, but like cattle they must be slaughtered by hand to be kosher, so venison shot in the wild is off the table.
Q 05Why specifically is the pig excluded as non-kosher?
It does not chew the cud
It does not chew the cud, though the pig does have split hooves; a midrash pictures it lying down with its hooves stretched out, as if to say 'See, I am pure.'
Q 06Which soft drink replaced a beef-fat ingredient in 1935 so that a rabbi could certify it kosher?
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola let Rabbi Tobias Geffen read its secret ingredient list on a promise of silence; he found glycerin made from beef tallow, and the company switched to a vegetable version.
Q 07Why do Orthodox rabbis rule sturgeon non-kosher?
Its scales are extremely hard to remove
Its scales are extremely hard to remove without tearing the skin, and kosher scales must come away cleanly; that puts true sturgeon caviar off the Orthodox menu, though Conservative rabbis permit the fish.
Q 08What is the only kosher invertebrate?
Certain locusts
Certain locusts are permitted by the Torah, but only a few communities, such as Yemen's Jews, kept a tradition of which species it means, so most Jews never eat them.
Q 09What is a kosher ritual slaughterer called?
A shochet
A shochet is no mere butcher: he must be pious and schooled in Jewish law, so in small communities the rabbi often did the slaughtering himself.
Q 10What is the ultra-sharp knife used for kosher slaughter called by Ashkenazi Jews?
Chalaf
Chalaf: the blade must be flawlessly smooth, so it is tested along a fingernail before and after each slaughter, and a single nick found afterwards makes the meat non-kosher.
Q 11What reason does the Torah give for forbidding the eating of blood?
It carries the animal's life
It carries the animal's life: 'the life of the flesh is in the blood', the Torah says, which is why kosher meat is soaked and salted to draw the last of it out.
Q 12Which organ is so rich in blood that kosher law requires it to be broiled over a flame, never just salted?
The liver
The liver holds too much blood for salt to draw out, so only fire will do; in fact any kosher meat may skip the salting if it is broiled instead.
Q 13Which ingredient in Oreo's creme filling kept the cookie from being kosher until Nabisco dropped it in the 1990s?
Lard
Q 21Which principle of Jewish law, 'saving a life', allows a patient to eat non-kosher food if recovery depends on it?
Pikuach nefesh
Pikuach nefesh puts a life above almost every other commandment: the Mishnah says a person seized by ravenous hunger on Yom Kippur may be fed even forbidden food until he recovers.
Q 22Which African animal do kosher authorities count as a permitted species, alongside the cow and the goat?
Giraffe
Giraffe: it chews the cud and has split hooves, the two signs of a kosher mammal, so kosher agencies list it among the permitted species even though nobody sells the meat.
Q 23Which bird did Jews come to accept as kosher even though no ancient tradition (masorah) could vouch for it?
Turkey
Lard, which is pig fat, was taken out mainly for health reasons; only then could Nabisco begin the long, costly job of making its bakeries kosher.
Q 14Which biblical patriarch's injury is the reason the sciatic nerve is removed from kosher meat?
Jacob's
Jacob's hip was wrenched as he wrestled a mysterious figure until daybreak, and Genesis says that is why Israelites do not eat the thigh sinew to this day.
Q 15Which cut of beef is rarely found at kosher butchers because it comes from the animal's hindquarters?
Sirloin
Sirloin sits in the hindquarters, where the forbidden sciatic nerve and fats are so laborious to cut out that most kosher butchers outside Israel sell the whole rear half to non-kosher dealers.
Q 16Which food did the rabbis add to the ban on mixing meat with dairy, beyond the Torah's own wording?
Chicken
Chicken: the Torah speaks only of a kid in its mother's milk, and birds give no milk, but the rabbis extended the ban to poultry as a safeguard.
Q 17According to the Shulchan Aruch, how long should one wait after eating meat before consuming dairy?
Six hours
Six hours lets the fatty taste fade and frees any meat caught between the teeth; some communities wait only three hours, or just one.
Q 18Which Yiddish labels sort a kosher kitchen's two sets of dishes?
Fleishig and milchig
Fleishig and milchig, meaty and milky: a pot or plate is held to take up the taste of hot food and pass it on to the next dish, so each kind gets a set of its own.
Q 19What is a food that is neither meat nor dairy called?
Pareve
Pareve food can share a table with either kind, and bread is kept pareve by rabbinic rule, because a loaf baked with milk might be eaten at a meat meal by mistake.
Q 20Which ingredient is the reason hard cheese needs kosher supervision?
Rennet
Rennet curdles milk into cheese, and because it so often came from animal stomachs, the rabbis ruled that cheese needs a Jewish supervisor on hand even when no animal rennet is used.
Turkey was unknown in the Old World, so no tradition could vouch for it; it was accepted because it shows the signs of a kosher bird and so many Jews already ate it, though some families still abstain.
Q 24By the Mishnah's rule of thumb, which habit marks a bird as non-kosher?
Hunting other animals
Hunting other animals: the Torah names 24 forbidden birds without saying why, and the rabbis noticed they are nearly all raptors and scavengers, so any bird that seizes prey is ruled out.
Q 25What is a hechsher?
A kosher certification mark
A kosher certification mark involves no blessing: an inspector checks the ingredients and the production line, and Muslims, vegans and people with dairy allergies read the labels too.
Q 26Which organisation launched the first independent kosher certification service in 1923?
The Orthodox Union (OU)
The Orthodox Union (OU) started the service under the chemist Abraham Goldstein, who walked out twelve years later to found its first rival, the OK.
Q 27Which fish do Conservative rabbis accept as kosher although standard Orthodox opinion rejects it?
Swordfish
Swordfish are born with scales but shed them as they grow, so Orthodox authorities rule the adult fish out while the Conservative movement accepts it.
Q 28What image is on the 1,500-year-old clay stamp from near Acre that a Jewish bakery pressed into its bread?
A menorah
A menorah marked the loaves as Jewish in a region that was then mostly Christian, where the far more common bread stamps carried a cross.
Q 29What does 'glatt' mean in Yiddish?
Smooth
Smooth: it first described an animal whose insides passed inspection without a blemish, but in everyday speech 'glatt kosher' has loosened to mean simply kosher beyond question.
Q 30Which organ is inspected in every kosher-slaughtered mammal for adhesions, scar tissue that may hide a puncture?
The lungs
The lungs matter because an animal with an injury that would have killed it within a year is not kosher, however cleanly it was slaughtered.