Vegetarianism Trivia
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46 free Vegetarianism trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Vegetarianism is far older than the word for it, and this quiz covers both. It starts with the definitions (what a lacto-vegetarian will not eat, why vegans are stricter, where pescetarians got their name), then goes back to the Jain prince who walked out of his own wedding, the Pythagorean way of life, the near-disappearance of meatless eating in Christian Europe and its Renaissance revival with Leonardo da Vinci. From there it follows the modern movement: Alcott House on Ham Common, the Vegetarian Society of 1847, Shelley's Vindication, Tolstoy, Shaw, Gandhi and the Adventists of Battle Creek. There are questions on India, the most vegetarian country on Earth, with its meat-free holy towns, its 75% vegetarian state and its green and brown dots, and on the food itself: tofu, tempeh, seitan, the VegeBurger, Quorn's fungus, Kellogg's Protose and Linda McCartney's sausages. World Vegetarian Day, Meatless Monday and vitamin B12 round it out. Easy questions suit anyone who has ordered the veggie option; the expert tier asks about vegetarian rennet and a Paraguayan colony. For veganism specifically, try our Vegan quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on vegetarianism, its history and the foods and organisations involved, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of these foods is off the menu on a lacto-vegetarian diet?
Eggs
Eggs are out and dairy stays, because 'lacto' comes from the Latin for milk. In India, where this is the everyday meaning of vegetarian, eggs are classed as non-vegetarian food.
Q 02Which word did Donald Watson's new society choose in 1944 over rivals such as 'dairyban', 'vitan' and 'benevore'?
Vegan
Vegan won because, as Watson put it, the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian' marked the beginning and end of vegetarian.
Q 03The world's first Vegetarian Society was founded in 1847 in which country?
England
England: the society formed at Ramsgate is credited with bringing the word 'vegetarian' into general use, and two of the diet's early English champions bore the ironic names Cowherd and Lambe.
Q 04Which technology company was named by a co-founder who was on a fruitarian diet and just back from an orchard?
Apple
Apple: Steve Jobs said he was on 'one of my fruitarian diets', had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded 'fun, spirited and not intimidating'.
Q 05Which ingredient makes most marshmallows and jelly sweets unsuitable for vegetarians?
Gelatine
Gelatine is collagen from animal skin and bones, and because it also thickens some yoghurts and forms many capsule shells, vegetarians end up checking labels far beyond the sweet aisle.
Q 06The red food colouring carmine, which vegetarians avoid, is made by crushing what?
Insects
Insects: carmine comes from cochineal bugs that live on cacti, so a yoghurt or sweet coloured with 'natural red 4', also labelled E120, is not vegetarian.
Q 07Which diet word did the American Dialect Society vote the most useful word of 2003?
Flexitarian
Flexitarian, in the society's words 'a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat', is a label vegetarian groups dispute: the Vegetarian Society's own rule is simply not to eat animals or fish.
Q 08A 2025 study of nitrogen isotopes in fossil teeth found which early human ancestor ate an almost wholly plant-based diet?
Australopithecus
Australopithecus teeth from the Sterkfontein caves showed no sign of regular meat-eating, so the meat often credited with fuelling bigger brains seems to have joined the menu later.
Q 09Which Indian religion made strict vegetarianism mandatory for ascetics and laity alike?
Jainism
Jainism goes further still: many followers also avoid root vegetables, because pulling one up kills the whole plant and the tiny creatures living around it.
Q 10What is the Indian principle of nonviolence towards all living beings called?
Ahimsa
Ahimsa is taken so far by some monks that they sweep the ground ahead of them and cover their mouths with cloth, so as not to harm even the smallest creature.
Q 11Which Indian pilgrimage town banned the sale of meat, fish and eggs in 1956?
Rishikesh
Several other Indian pilgrimage towns have since followed with bans of their own.
Q 12Which Indian holy town, known for its annual camel fair, allows no meat or alcohol to be sold?
Pushkar
Pushkar is crowded with temples around a lake sacred to Brahma, the reason its kitchens serve neither meat nor alcohol, even to the crowds who come for the camel fair.
Q 13A 2014 Indian government survey found which state had the highest share of vegetarians, at about three in four?
Rajasthan
Rajasthan came top, but the surprise was Punjab: a state whose cooking is famed for butter chicken turned out to be about two-thirds vegetarian.
Q 21Which Russian novelist was one of the most prominent advocates of vegetarianism in his country?
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy held that a moral life had to begin with giving up meat, and said so in an essay he called The First Step, written to introduce a history of vegetarian thought.
Q 22Which Irish playwright gave up meat in 1881 and lived to the age of 94?
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw became the cause's showpiece: vegetarian papers held him up as living proof that brain work needs no meat, and the Vegetarian Society was still saluting him on his 90th birthday.
Q 23Which future independence leader sat on a vegetarian society's committee while a young law student?
Mahatma Gandhi
Q 14Indian packaged food carries a green mark if vegetarian and what colour if non-vegetarian?
Brown
Brown marks non-vegetarian food, and its dot has since been redrawn as a triangle so that colour-blind shoppers can tell it from the green one.
Q 15Which giant tropical fruit is shredded as a plant-based stand-in for pulled pork?
Jackfruit
Jackfruit, the largest fruit that grows on a tree at up to 50 kg, earns the role because its flesh can mimic the texture of meat, and it is now tinned and sold as a meat alternative.
Q 16Which philosopher made the ethical case against eating animals in the 1975 book Animal Liberation?
Peter Singer
Peter Singer argued that an animal's capacity to suffer, not its species, is what counts, and he popularised the word 'speciesism' for ignoring it.
Q 17In antiquity, abstaining from meat was a hallmark of the way of life named after which Greek philosopher?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras lent his name to the diet itself: until the word 'vegetarian' caught on in the 1840s, people who gave up meat were known as Pythagoreans.
Q 18In the 17th century the Bishop of Quebec won a Church ruling that which animal counted as fish during Lent?
Beaver
Beaver passed because it swims, a sign of how little the old meatless days had to do with vegetarianism, which had all but vanished from Europe once Rome turned Christian.
Q 19Which Renaissance painter is counted among the first to back the meat-free diet's revival in Europe?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci, his biographer Vasari wrote, would pay bird-sellers their asking price simply to open the cages and let the birds fly away.
Q 20Which Romantic poet published the essay A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley first wrote it as a note to his poem Queen Mab, arguing that meat was unnatural food for humans and the root of both disease and vice.
Mahatma Gandhi had sworn to his mother that he would not touch meat abroad and went hungry keeping the vow, until Henry Salt's writing turned a promise into a conviction.
Q 24Nueva Germania, a vegetarian colony in 1880s Paraguay, was co-founded by which philosopher's sister?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth and her husband Bernhard Förster planned a meat-free settlement for 'pure' Germans, but the venture was near bankruptcy by the decade's end.
Q 25Which American Founding Father took up a 'vegetable diet' at 16 and spent the money he saved on books?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin lapsed on a sea voyage when frying cod smelt too good: seeing small fish inside the catch, he decided that if fish ate one another, he might as well eat them.
Q 26Which Indian emperor announced that the animals killed daily for his kitchen had been cut to two peacocks and a deer?
Ashoka
Ashoka had the pledge carved in stone for his subjects to read, admitting that hundreds of thousands of animals were once killed there for curry and promising that even these three would be spared.
Q 27What is the free communal kitchen of a Sikh gurdwara, which serves only vegetarian food to all comers, called?
Langar
Langar stays meat-free even though Sikhs are not required to be vegetarian, which lets visitors of every faith and background sit down together to the same simple meal.
Q 28Bronson Alcott, founder of the short-lived meat-free commune Fruitlands, was the father of which novel's author?
Little Women
Little Women's author, Louisa May Alcott, lived through it as a child: the commune shunned animal food and even animal labour, lasted seven months, and became her sketch Transcendental Wild Oats.
Q 29In the Bible, which exile at Nebuchadnezzar's court asked to be tested for ten days on only vegetables and water?
Daniel
Daniel and his three friends ended the ten days looking healthier than the youths fed from the king's table, and the passage now gives its name to a fast kept by some churches.
Q 30The meat substitute Quorn is made from what kind of organism?
A microfungus
A microfungus named Fusarium venenatum, found living in soil, is grown by the same fermentation that gives us beer and bread; most Quorn is then bound with egg white, so it suits vegetarians but not those who avoid every animal product.