Vegan Trivia
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106 free Vegan trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
54 free vegan trivia questions with answers, written for anyone who wants more than a Veganuary quiz. The questions cover the word itself (coined in 1944 from the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian'), the newsletter that launched the movement, the American societies that followed, and the moment plant milk went from a Leicester side project to a Nasdaq listing. There is a lot of food science in here too: what aquafaba actually is and which Latin words it was stitched from, the mould that turns soybeans into tempeh, the sixth-century Chinese encyclopedia that first described seitan, why the Impossible Burger bleeds, and where the pea protein in a Beyond Burger comes from. A run of questions on hidden animal ingredients (isinglass, carmine, shellac, gelatin) will trip up plenty of long-time vegans. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or a primary source before publishing, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Difficulty runs from easy openers on tofu and jackfruit to expert questions on 1849 cookbooks and Michelin stars, so the quiz works for a plant-based potluck as well as a serious pub round.
30 of 106 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year was the word 'vegan' coined?
1944
Vegan was coined in 1944, when the Vegan Society formed in England and launched a newsletter for members who also shunned dairy and eggs.
Q 02The word 'vegan' was formed by contracting which longer word?
Vegetarian
Vegetarian: the coiner kept its first three and last two letters, saying veganism marked the point where vegetarianism should logically end up.
Q 03Who coined the word 'vegan'?
Donald Watson
Donald Watson, a Yorkshire-born woodwork teacher, coined 'vegan' and co-founded the Vegan Society, editing its first newsletter himself.
Q 04World Vegan Day is celebrated on which date each year?
1 November
1 November is World Vegan Day, begun in 1994 by Vegan Society chair Louise Wallis to mark the society's 50th anniversary; November is World Vegan Month.
Q 05What was the Vegan Society's first newsletter, a quarterly launched with the society, called?
The Vegan News
The Vegan News was the quarterly newsletter the society's founder produced himself; it was later retitled simply The Vegan.
Q 06Which reference work was the first to publish the word 'vegan' independently, in 1962?
Oxford Illustrated Dictionary
The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary added 'vegan' in 1962, defining it as someone who eats no butter, eggs, cheese or milk.
Q 07The first vegan society in the United States was founded in 1948 in which state?
California
California: Catherine Nimmo and Rubin Abramowitz founded the first US vegan society at Oceano in 1948, twelve years before a national society followed.
Q 08Who founded the American Vegan Society in 1960?
H. Jay Dinshah
Dinshah ran the society from Malaga, New Jersey, for four decades and promoted the term 'ahimsa' as its guiding principle.
Q 09Which Romantic poet published 'A Vindication of Natural Diet' in 1813?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley's wife Mary made the creature in Frankenstein shun meat too, five years later.
Q 10Who wrote 'Kitchen Philosophy for Vegetarians' (1849), regarded as the first vegan cookbook?
Asenath Nicholson
Nicholson was an American reformer who is better remembered for her eyewitness accounts of the Irish famine.
Q 11Which organisation did Leslie Cross found in 1956 to develop a dairy-free milk?
The Plantmilk Society
The Plantmilk Society, founded by Leslie Cross in 1956, became Plantmilk Ltd in 1965 and made one of Britain's first widely sold soy milks; it later traded as Plamil.
Q 12The Economist declared which year 'the year of the vegan'?
2019
2019: The Economist's 'The World in 2019' issue called it the year of the vegan; that year Beyond Meat went public and Burger King took the Impossible Whopper nationwide.
Q 13The Herbivorous Butcher, described as America's first vegan butcher shop, opened in 2016 in which city?
Minneapolis
Minneapolis: siblings Aubry and Kale Walch opened The Herbivorous Butcher there in January 2016, selling plant-based meats and cheeses from a storefront.
Q 21The heme protein that makes an Impossible Burger 'bleed' is modelled on a molecule found naturally where?
In soybean roots
In soybean roots: Impossible's heme is soy leghemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of soybean root nodules, made at scale by genetically engineered yeast rather than harvested from plants.
Q 22Which New York restaurant, owned by David Chang, was the first to serve the Impossible Burger in July 2016?
Momofuku Nishi
Momofuku Nishi, David Chang's Chelsea restaurant, put the Impossible Burger on its menu in July 2016, the first public sale of the product.
Q 23The primary protein in Beyond Meat products comes from which plant?
Peas
Q 14Europe's first vegan supermarkets, Veganz and Vegilicious, opened in 2011 in which country?
Germany
Germany: Veganz opened in Berlin and Vegilicious in Dortmund in 2011, the first all-vegan supermarkets in Europe.
Q 15Which festival offered vegan dishes for the first time in its 200-year history in 2013?
Oktoberfest
Oktoberfest, the Munich beer festival famous for pork knuckle, sausages and roast meats, put vegan dishes on its menus for the first time in 2013.
Q 16In what year did the first Veganuary challenge take place?
2014
2014: Veganuary ran its first January pledge that year, founded by Jane Land and Matthew Glover; the 2021 campaign alone drew more than 580,000 sign-ups.
Q 17Veganuary, the pledge to eat vegan for January, was founded in which English city?
York
York: Veganuary was founded in the northern English city by Jane Land and Matthew Glover, who ran the first campaign from there.
Q 18In January 2021, which restaurant became the first vegan restaurant in France to receive a Michelin star?
ONA
ONA, short for Origine Non Animale, is Claire Vallée's restaurant at Arès near Bordeaux; the 2021 Michelin Guide gave it France's first star for a vegan kitchen.
Q 19The name 'aquafaba' was coined in 2015 from Latin words meaning what?
Water and bean
Water and bean: aqua plus faba, the Latin for broad bean; Goose Wohlt coined the name in 2015, and it echoes the legume family Fabaceae.
Q 20Impossible Foods was founded in 2011 by which Stanford biochemistry professor?
Patrick Brown
Brown took a sabbatical to work out how to replace animals in the food system and never went back.
Peas: Beyond Meat builds its burgers and sausages on pea protein isolate, with beet juice for colour and coconut oil for fat; France's Roquette became a major pea-protein supplier in 2020.
Q 24By roughly how much did Beyond Meat's share price rise on its first day of trading?
163%
163%: Beyond Meat priced its IPO at $25 and closed its first day at $65.75, the best debut by a major US company since 2000.
Q 25Beyond Meat's first product, sold at Whole Foods in 2012, imitated which meat?
Chicken
The 'Chicken-Free Strips' came four years before the Beyond Burger patty in 2016.
Q 26Tempeh is a traditional fermented soybean food from which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia: tempeh originated on the island of Java, where it is a staple protein; the flavour grows earthier as the cake ages.
Q 27What kind of organism binds soybeans into a cake of tempeh?
A mould
A mould: Rhizopus oligosporus (or R. oryzae) sends white mycelial threads through the cooked soybeans and knits them into a firm cake.
Q 28Seitan, the chewy meat substitute, is made from what?
Wheat gluten
Wheat gluten: seitan is the elastic protein left when wheat dough is rinsed of its starch; its earliest description is in the Qimin Yaoshu, a Chinese agricultural text of 535.
Q 29The word 'seitan' was coined in 1961 by George Ohsawa, an advocate of which diet?
Macrobiotic
Macrobiotic: Japanese writer George Ohsawa, founder of the macrobiotic movement, named the food seitan in 1961; in China it had long been called mianjin.
Q 30What is the informal nickname for nutritional yeast?
Nooch
Nooch: the nickname for nutritional yeast, a deactivated strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae sold as yellow flakes with a nutty, cheesy flavour.