60 free Vegan trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year was the word 'vegan' coined?
1944
Donald and Dorothy Watson coined it while setting up a newsletter in Leicester, England, for members who also shunned dairy and eggs.
Q 02The word 'vegan' was built from the first three and last two letters of which word?
Vegetarian
Its inventor said it marked the beginning and end of vegetarianism, the point the movement should logically arrive at.
Q 03Who coined the word 'vegan'?
Donald Watson
He was a woodwork teacher who set up the first vegan newsletter with the schoolteacher he later married.
Q 04World Vegan Day is celebrated on which date each year?
1 November
The date marks the founding of the Vegan Society in November 1944; November as a whole is often promoted as World Vegan Month.
Q 05Which famous playwright wrote to the first issue of The Vegan News in 1944?
George Bernard Shaw
Shaw had been a vegetarian since the 1880s and lived to 94, which he liked to attribute to his diet.
Q 06The Society's founding quarterly newsletter, launched in late 1944, was called what?
The Vegan News
It was renamed simply The Vegan a year later, by which time it had 500 subscribers.
Q 07Which reference work was the first to publish the word 'vegan' independently, in 1962?
Oxford Illustrated Dictionary
That was 18 years after the word was coined; the Oxford English Dictionary itself defines the term today with the 1944 origin.
Q 08The first vegan society in the United States was founded in 1948 in which state?
California
Catherine Nimmo and Rubin Abramowitz founded it, twelve years before the American Vegan Society appeared.
Q 09Who 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 10Which 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 11Who 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 12Leslie Cross founded which organisation in 1956, the seed of what became Plamil Foods?
The Plantmilk Society
By 1965 it was producing one of the first widely distributed soy milks in Britain.
Q 13The Economist declared which year 'the year of the vegan'?
2019
That same year Burger King rolled out the Impossible Whopper nationwide and Beyond Meat went public.
Q 21The name 'aquafaba' was coined in 2015 from Latin words meaning what?
Water and bean
Goose Wohlt picked the name; the 'faba' part is also a nod to the legume family Fabaceae.
Q 22Impossible 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.
Q 23The heme protein that makes an Impossible Burger 'bleed' is modelled on a molecule found naturally where?
In soybean roots
Soy leghemoglobin is produced by genetically engineered yeast rather than harvested from plants.
Q 14The Herbivorous Butcher, described as America's first vegan butcher shop, opened in 2016 in which city?
Minneapolis
It was beaten to the world-first title by The Vegetarian Butcher, which opened in the Netherlands in 2010.
Q 15Europe's first vegan supermarkets, Veganz and Vegilicious, opened in 2011 in which country?
Germany
Veganz started in Berlin and Vegilicious in Dortmund; Berlin has since become one of the most vegan-friendly cities in the world.
Q 16Which festival offered vegan dishes for the first time in its 200-year history in 2013?
Oktoberfest
The Munich beer festival is otherwise famous for roast chicken, pork knuckle and sausages.
Q 17In what year did the first Veganuary challenge take place?
2014
By January 2021 more than 580,000 people from 209 countries and territories had signed up for it.
Q 18Veganuary, the pledge to eat vegan for January, was founded in which English city?
York
Participants sign up online and receive a starter kit and daily support emails for the month.
Q 19In January 2021, which restaurant became the first vegan restaurant in France to receive a Michelin star?
ONA
ONA stands for Origine Non Animale; 79 more vegan restaurants around the world earned stars that year.
Q 20Aquafaba, the egg-white substitute, is the leftover cooking water of which food?
Chickpeas
It whips into a stable foam, so it can be used for meringues and mousses with no stabilisers at all.
Q 24Which New York restaurant, owned by David Chang, was the first to serve the Impossible Burger in July 2016?
Momofuku Nishi
Three years later Burger King put the Impossible Whopper on menus nationwide.
Q 25The primary protein in Beyond Meat products comes from which plant?
Peas
The pea protein is supplied by the French company Roquette Frères.
Q 26By roughly how much did Beyond Meat's share price surge on its first day of trading in May 2019?
163%
It was the best-performing public offering by a major US company since 2000.
Q 27Beyond 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 28Tempeh is a traditional fermented soybean food from which country?
Indonesia
It is native to Java, where it is a staple protein, and gets earthier in flavour as it ages.
Q 29What kind of organism binds soybeans into a cake of tempeh?
A mould
Rhizopus oligosporus or Rhizopus oryzae grows white threads through the beans and knits them together.
Q 30Seitan, the chewy meat substitute, is made from what?
Wheat gluten
Its oldest known description is in the Qimin Yaoshu, a Chinese agricultural encyclopedia from the year 535.