Milk Trivia
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99 free Milk trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
74 free milk trivia questions with answers. Seventy-four questions on milk and dairy, from the glass on the table to the industry behind it. The science round covers why milk is white, what lactose actually is, how many adults cannot digest it, what pasteurisation and homogenisation really do, UHT, colostrum, casein and the animals whose milk is more than half fat. Then the dairy aisle: cheese from Emmental's holes to Sardinia's maggot cheese, the bacteria in yogurt, how butter and buttermilk are made, Häagen-Dazs's invented name and what legally counts as ice cream. Plus which country produces the most milk, why India overtook America, and the breed that makes up 90% of US herds. The rest is history and culture. Gail Borden's condensed milk, the first glass bottle and paper carton, missing children on cartons, Tetra Pak, milk bags in Canada, Britain's electric milk floats, the milk snatcher, 'got milk?' and its Michael Bay debut, World Milk Day, oat milk's Swedish inventor, the Cleopatra milk-bath myth, and Milk Duds. It suits a food round at a pub quiz, a school lesson or a dairy-industry team social. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the products, people and processes involved, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country is the world's largest producer of milk?
India
India has been the world's largest milk producer since 1998, turning out well over 200 million tonnes a year, roughly a fifth of global output, much of it from water buffalo.
Q 02Which country lost its place as the world's largest milk producer in 1998?
The USA
The USA was overtaken by India in 1998; India's Operation Flood dairy programme, launched in 1970, turned a milk-deficient nation into the world's top producer.
Q 03Milk looks white because light is scattered by fat globules and by tiny clusters of which protein?
Casein
Casein micelles are just large enough to deflect light and make up about 80% of the protein in cow's milk.
Q 04The main sugar in milk, lactose, is a disaccharide made of glucose and which other sugar?
Galactose
Lactose is glucose bonded to galactose; the enzyme lactase splits the two apart, and people who stop making lactase after infancy become lactose intolerant.
Q 05Roughly what share of adults worldwide are affected by lactose malabsorption?
About 65%
About 65% of adults worldwide have a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy; the trait is rarest in people of Northern European descent and reaches around 90% in East Asians.
Q 06Pasteur's 1860s experiments showed heat could stop unwanted microbes in what?
Wine
He worked out the gentler method during an 1864 summer holiday in Arbois; heating wine to preserve it was already known in China by 1117.
Q 07Standard 'high temperature short time' pasteurisation heats milk to 72°C for how long?
15 seconds
HTST pasteurisation holds milk at 72°C for 15 seconds, enough to kill pathogens such as Mycobacterium bovis while leaving the taste largely unchanged.
Q 08UHT milk is heated above roughly what temperature for a couple of moments?
140°C
UHT treatment heats milk to about 140°C for a few seconds, hot enough to destroy bacterial spores; developed in the 1960s, it reached shops in the 1970s.
Q 09Homogenisation stops bottled milk separating into cream and skim by doing what to its fat globules?
Breaking them into tiny even droplets
Breaking them into tiny even droplets spreads the fat evenly through the milk; left alone, it rises and collects as a layer of cream on top.
Q 10Which breed accounts for about 90% of dairy cows in the United States?
Holstein
Holsteins, the black-and-white cows bred from Dutch and North German stock, make up about 90% of the US dairy herd because no other breed matches their milk yield.
Q 11Milk from Jersey and Guernsey cows has a golden tinge because of what?
Carotene in the fat
Carotene in the fat gives the milk its golden tinge: Jerseys and Guernseys pass the grass pigment into their unusually rich butterfat instead of converting it all to vitamin A.
Q 12Which animals' milk can contain more than 50% fat, the highest of any mammal?
Seals and whales
Seals and whales make the richest milk of any mammal: hooded seal milk is about 60% fat, letting pups double their weight in a nursing period of only four days.
Q 13Which fermented drink from Central Asia is made from mare's milk?
Kumis
Kumis is fermented mare's milk; mare's milk carries more sugar than cow's or goat's, so fermentation leaves the drink mildly alcoholic.
Q 21Dulce de leche, the caramel-coloured spread of Argentina and Latin America, is made by slowly heating milk with what?
Sugar
Sugar and milk, cooked for hours, make dulce de leche; customs records show a version called manjar reaching Argentina from Chile as early as 1693.
Q 22Gail Borden received a patent in 1856 for condensing milk using what?
A vacuum
A vacuum pan let Borden boil milk at low temperature without scorching it; his 1856 patent led to a Connecticut condensery that year, and Civil War army orders made his fortune.
Q 23The first commercial glass milk jar patent in the United States was granted in 1878 to whom?
George Henry Lester
Q 14The fizzy fermented milk drink from the Caucasus is made by adding what to milk?
Kefir grains
Kefir grains, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts rather than cereal grains, ferment the milk and give kefir its slight fizz and tang.
Q 15The word 'yogurt' comes from which language?
Turkish
Yogurt comes from Turkish yoğurt, related to a verb meaning to thicken or knead; the word is recorded in Mahmud al-Kashgari's 11th-century dictionary of Turkic languages.
Q 16Butter is roughly what percentage butterfat?
About 81%
It is made by churning cream until the fat and protein separate from the buttermilk.
Q 17What is whey?
The liquid left after curdling
Whey is the liquid left after curdling: once milk sets into curds, the watery remainder is drained off and can be recooked into ricotta or boiled down into Norway's brown cheese.
Q 18The earliest archaeological evidence of cheesemaking, around 5500 BC, comes from which modern country?
Poland
Pottery strainers from Kuyavia in Poland, dated to around 5500 BC, carried milk-fat residues, the oldest direct evidence of cheesemaking; Egyptian tomb murals depict cheese from about 2000 BC.
Q 19Paneer, the fresh curd of South Asian cooking, is set with what rather than rennet?
An acid such as lemon juice
Paneer is set with an acid such as lemon juice or vinegar rather than rennet, which is why it does not melt and holds its shape in curries.
Q 20Ghee, essential to Indian cooking and Hindu ritual, is a type of what?
Clarified butter
Clarified butter is what ghee is: the milk solids and water are cooked off, leaving pure fat that keeps without refrigeration.
George Henry Lester received the first US patent for a glass milk container in 1878; Hervey Thatcher's 'Common Sense Milk Jar', sealed with a waxed paper disc, followed in 1884 and became the familiar model.
Q 24John Van Wormer of which city patented the gable-topped 'Pure-Pak' milk carton in 1915?
Toledo, Ohio
John Van Wormer, a Toledo, Ohio toy maker, patented his 'paper bottle' in 1915; licensed as Pure-Pak, the gable-top carton could be folded, filled and sealed at the dairy and eventually displaced the glass bottle.
Q 25In the 1980s, US milk cartons famously carried photos of what?
Missing children
Photos of missing children appeared on cartons from 1984, beginning with two Des Moines paperboys, in the hope that a breakfast-table glance would jog someone's memory and bring a tip to police.
Q 26Which Swedish company introduced the aseptic carton that lets UHT milk keep unrefrigerated?
Tetra Pak
Tetra Pak unveiled its first aseptic carton in 1961: plastic-coated paperboard filled under sterile conditions, so the UHT milk inside keeps for months without refrigeration.
Q 27Milk in Canada is commonly sold in bags holding how much?
1 1/3 litres
Canadian bags hold 1 1/3 litres, three to a four-litre pack; elsewhere bags hold about a litre in South America, Iran, Israel and parts of Europe, and half a litre in India.
Q 28By 1967, Britain's battery-powered milk floats had given the country what distinction?
Most electric vehicles in the world
Most electric vehicles in the world: by 1967 Britain's battery milk floats outnumbered the battery vehicles of the rest of the world combined, electric floats having replaced horse-drawn carts from the 1930s.
Q 29Why did doorstep milk delivery decline sharply in the second half of the 20th century?
Home fridges and supermarkets
Home fridges and supermarkets ended the round: once households could keep milk cold for days and buy it cheaply with the weekly shop, daily doorstep delivery lost its reason to exist.
Q 30'Milk snatcher' Thatcher ended free school milk for children of which ages?
Seven to eleven
As Education Secretary in 1971 Thatcher withdrew free milk from children aged seven to eleven as part of wider spending cuts; under-sevens kept their third of a pint a day.