Quick answer: Sixty food trivia questions with answers, in six rounds of ten: dishes of the world, fruit and vegetables, drinks, famous foods, the science of food and a hard round to finish. Every answer comes with one extra fact for the host to read out.
Food is the round nobody fears. Everyone eats, so everyone has a fighting chance, and the arguments it starts are the friendly kind: is a tomato a fruit, who really invented the croissant, why does an onion make you cry.
These sixty run from easy to hard inside each round, so you can stop wherever the room starts to struggle. We left out prices, records and anything that changes from year to year, so the sheet will still be right next autumn.
How to use these: one food round fits nicely in the middle of a quiz night, after the warm-up and before the hard rounds. If you only need ten questions, take two from each of the first five rounds. Read each question twice and mark the answers after the round.
Round one: dishes of the world
1. Which country does paella come from?
Spain. It was born in the rice fields around Valencia, where the original version used chicken, rabbit and sometimes snails rather than seafood.
2. What is the main ingredient of guacamole?
Avocado. The name comes from the Aztec Nahuatl word ahuacamolli, avocado sauce.
3. What is hummus made from?
Chickpeas, blended with tahini, lemon juice and garlic. Hummus is simply the Arabic word for chickpea.
4. Which Italian city is the home of the pizza Margherita?
Naples. The story goes that it was named in 1889 after Queen Margherita, with tomato, mozzarella and basil standing in for the red, white and green of the Italian flag.
5. What is the paprika stew that is Hungary's national dish?
Goulash, or gulyás, which originally meant herdsman.
6. What is sushi rice seasoned with?
Rice vinegar, with a little sugar and salt. Sushi refers to the vinegared rice, not the raw fish.
7. Which Japanese soup is made from fermented soybean paste?
Miso soup.
8. Which country put its beetroot soup, borscht, on the UNESCO list of endangered cultural heritage in 2022?
Ukraine. Borscht is eaten across Eastern Europe, which makes the question a good argument starter.
9. What is haggis traditionally cooked in?
A sheep's stomach.
10. What is the spicy fermented cabbage served with almost every Korean meal?
Kimchi.
Round two: fruit, vegetables and nuts
11. Botanically, is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
A fruit, a berry in fact. In 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable anyway, for tax purposes.
12. Which fruit wears its seeds on the outside?
The strawberry. Each little seed is technically a fruit of its own.
13. Which is a berry: a banana or a strawberry?
The banana. Botanically, strawberries are not berries at all.
14. Which vegetable became the first to be grown in space, in 1995?
The potato, on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
15. What colour were most carrots before the 1600s?
Purple or yellow. The orange carrot became common through Dutch growers in the seventeenth century.
16. Which fruit is banned on Singapore's trains because of its smell?
The durian, often called the king of fruits.
17. Which nut is marzipan made from?
Almonds, ground and mixed with sugar.
18. Peanuts are not nuts. What are they?
Legumes, in the same family as peas and beans. They grow underground.
19. Which spice comes from the stigmas of a crocus flower?
Saffron, the most expensive spice in the world by weight. Each flower gives only three threads.
20. What fruit is dried to make a prune?
A plum.
Round three: drinks
21. Which country drinks the most tea per person?
Turkey, ahead of Ireland and the United Kingdom.
22. What gives tonic water its bitter taste?
Quinine, from the bark of the cinchona tree. It was drunk in British India to ward off malaria, which is how gin and tonic began.
23. Which grain is Japanese sake brewed from?
Rice.
24. Which spirit is made from the blue agave plant?
Tequila. It can only legally carry the name if it comes from Mexico.
25. Which coffee is named after the colour of a monk's robe?
The cappuccino, after the brown habits of the Capuchin friars.
26. Which country grows the most coffee?
Brazil, by a wide margin.
27. Cider is made from apples. What is perry made from?
Pears.
28. Which drink was created by an Atlanta pharmacist in 1886?
Coca-Cola, by John Pemberton. It was first sold as a medicine at a soda fountain.
29. Sparkling wine can only be called champagne if it comes from where?
The Champagne region of north-eastern France.
30. What does the Italian word espresso mean?
Pressed out, after the way hot water is forced through the coffee.
Round four: famous foods and where they came from
31. Which snack is named after an eighteenth-century English earl?
The sandwich, after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who wanted food he could eat without leaving his work.
32. Which brothers created cornflakes at a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan?
John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg.
33. Which chocolate bar comes in hundreds of flavours in Japan, from green tea to wasabi?
Kit Kat. Its name sounds like kitto katsu, "you will surely win", so students get them as good-luck gifts before exams.
34. What do the two Ms in M&M's stand for?
Mars and Murrie, after Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, who launched them together in 1941.
35. In which country was Nutella created?
Italy, by the Ferrero family in Piedmont, where hazelnuts were cheaper than scarce cocoa.
36. Which fast-food chain has Colonel Sanders as its face?
KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Harland Sanders was an honorary Kentucky colonel, not a soldier.
37. Which treat was popularised at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis?
The ice cream cone.
38. Who is fettuccine Alfredo named after?
Alfredo di Lelio, a restaurant owner in Rome. Hollywood stars on honeymoon made it famous in America.
39. Which Italian dessert's name means "pick me up"?
Tiramisu.
40. According to legend, which snack was invented when a chef sliced potatoes very thin to annoy a fussy customer?
The potato chip, or crisp, supposedly in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853. Historians doubt the story, but quiz hosts love it.
Round five: the science of food
41. Which vitamin in citrus fruit prevents scurvy?
Vitamin C. British sailors were given lime juice to keep it away, which is how they got the nickname limeys.
42. Which chemical makes chilli peppers hot?
Capsaicin.
43. What is the scale for measuring the heat of chillies called?
The Scoville scale, created by the pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912.
44. Why does cutting an onion make you cry?
Cutting releases a sulphur gas that irritates your eyes, and they flush it out with tears.
45. Which food can stay edible for thousands of years if it is sealed?
Honey. It is too sugary and too acidic for bacteria to survive in.
46. What is the browning reaction that gives toast, steak and coffee their flavour?
The Maillard reaction, between sugars and amino acids, named after the French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard.
47. What is tofu made from?
Soy milk, curdled and pressed into blocks, much like cheese.
48. Which gas makes bread dough rise?
Carbon dioxide, given off by yeast as it feeds on sugar.
49. What is the natural sugar in milk called?
Lactose.
50. Which fruit stops jelly from setting if you add it fresh?
Pineapple. An enzyme called bromelain breaks down the gelatin. Tinned pineapple is fine, because heating destroys the enzyme.
Round six: the hard round
51. What is umami?
The fifth basic taste, savoury, named in 1908 by the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda.
52. Which country grows the most avocados?
Mexico.
53. Which cheese goes into a classic Greek salad?
Feta.
54. Which spice gives curry its yellow colour?
Turmeric.
55. What is caviar?
Salt-cured fish eggs, traditionally from the sturgeon.
56. Which vegetable is sauerkraut made from?
Cabbage, fermented with salt.
57. From which Austrian pastry is the croissant said to descend?
The kipferl, a crescent-shaped bread from Vienna.
58. How many teaspoons make a tablespoon?
Three.
59. What did the French once call the tomato?
The pomme d'amour, or love apple.
60. Which Italian cheese is traditionally made from the milk of water buffalo?
Mozzarella di bufala, from Campania in southern Italy.
How to run a food round
Mix the easy and the clever. A food round works when half the questions are guessable and half have a twist, like the banana being a berry and the strawberry not. Read the twist answers out slowly. They are the ones people repeat at home.
Bring a tasting tie-breaker. If you are hosting in person, a blind taste test makes a better tie-breaker than any question. Three spices in three cups, and the closest team wins.
Not sure how to put a whole night together? Pub quiz rounds explained walks through the usual round types and the order that works.
More quiz questions
For more rounds to read aloud, trivia questions by category has sixty questions across ten subjects, with a full round each on sport, video games and movies. If you would rather play than host, try the 500 pub quiz questions online. For a gentler start, 50 easy trivia questions is the warm-up, and hard trivia questions is the other end of the scale.
And if you want the stories behind the answers, NerdSip turns any subject, from the history of chocolate to the chemistry of bread, into five-minute courses with a quick question at the end of each lesson.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are good food trivia questions for adults?
Questions with a twist people half-know. A banana is botanically a berry while a strawberry is not. Peanuts are legumes rather than nuts. Tonic water is bitter because of quinine, which is why gin and tonic began as a malaria remedy in British India.
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
Botanically a fruit, and a berry at that. In 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable anyway, because vegetables were taxed and fruit was not.
What food never goes off?
Honey, as long as it is sealed. It is too sugary and acidic for bacteria to grow in, and archaeologists have found edible honey in tombs thousands of years old.
How many questions should a food round have?
Ten is the standard round. For a full food-themed night, six rounds of ten run about two hours with scoring and a break.
What is the fifth taste?
Umami, the savoury taste of broth, aged cheese and soy sauce. It was named in 1908 by the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda, who traced it to glutamate.
Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.
Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.
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