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Food and Drink Quiz

Food and Drink Quiz

This food and drink quiz serves up questions on dishes and ingredients from around the world, including Italian pizza, Spanish rice, Korean side dishes and Mediterranean cheeses. You'll also tackle pastry types, a precious spice and the science behind the savory 'fifth taste'. It's ten tasty questions with bite-sized explanations, best enjoyed before dinner when you're already thinking about food.

10 questions
About 3 min
Answers explained
Free, no sign-up

Tip: press 1–4 to answer

Where our favorite foods come from

Food trivia is really a world tour on a plate. Many dishes we think of as ancient national treasures are younger than you'd expect, because key ingredients had to cross oceans first. Tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers and chocolate all come from the Americas, so cooks in Europe and Asia only began using them after the 1500s. Imagine Italian or Indian cooking before tomatoes and chilies arrived, and you get a sense of how much that exchange changed dinner everywhere.

A good trick for quizzes like this is to think about climate and geography. Olive oil, sheep's milk cheese and rice dishes tend to come from warm Mediterranean lands, while long winters inspired people to pickle, ferment and preserve whatever they could store. Islands and mountain valleys often produce foods so local that their names are legally protected.

Food questions are fun because everyone has a way in. You may never have traveled abroad, but you've probably eaten at a taco truck, a pizzeria or a sushi bar. Use your own kitchen and favorite restaurants as clues, and you'll be surprised how much you already know.