12 food and drink questions with answers
Every friend group has one person who is certain a tomato is a vegetable and another who says the green paste next to the sushi is "real wasabi". Food is the one subject where everybody has an opinion and almost nobody has checked.
Here are twelve food and drink questions, each with four options, a short answer, and a source where the answer is the kind people argue about. They suit a dinner table, a long train ride, or a group chat that has gone quiet.
How to run it
Read the question and all four options before anyone answers. Let everyone lock in a guess, then read the answer and the one-line reason. Nobody needs to keep score. The fun is in who was confidently wrong.
The questions
1. Botanically speaking, which of these is a berry? A) Strawberry. B) Raspberry. C) Banana. D) Cashew. Answer: C. A true berry grows from a single flower with one ovary. Bananas qualify. Strawberries and raspberries come from flowers with many ovaries, so they do not. (Live Science, accessed October 2026.)
2. Which spice is the most expensive by weight? A) Cardamom. B) Saffron. C) Vanilla. D) Black pepper. Answer: B. Saffron is the dried stigmas of a crocus flower, picked by hand, and it takes tens of thousands of flowers to make a single pound.
3. Where were potatoes first grown as a crop? A) Ireland. B) India. C) The Andes in South America. D) Russia. Answer: C. Potatoes were domesticated in the Andes, in what is now southern Peru and north-western Bolivia, thousands of years before they reached Europe or Asia.
4. Which country grows the most coffee? A) Ethiopia. B) Colombia. C) Vietnam. D) Brazil. Answer: D. Brazil produces roughly a third of the world's coffee and has led for well over a century. Rankings below first place move around from year to year.
5. Chocolate is made from the seeds of which plant? A) Cacao tree. B) Coffee shrub. C) Carob tree. D) Kola tree. Answer: A. The seeds, usually called cocoa beans, are fermented, dried and roasted before they become chocolate.
6. The "wasabi" served in most restaurants is usually made mainly from what? A) Green chilli. B) Horseradish. C) Mint. D) Green peas. Answer: B. Real wasabi is hard to grow and expensive, so horseradish with colouring is the common stand-in. Both plants belong to the same family as mustard and cabbage. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
7. Which compound makes chillies taste hot? A) Caffeine. B) Capsaicin. C) Citric acid. D) Piperine. Answer: B. Capsaicin. Piperine is the one that gives black pepper its bite, which is why it is the tempting wrong answer.
8. To a botanist, a tomato is a... A) Vegetable. B) Root. C) Fruit. D) Legume. Answer: C. It grows from the flower and carries the seeds, which makes it a fruit. In the kitchen it is still treated as a vegetable, so both people at your table can claim a win.
9. Why does sealed honey keep for so long? A) It is very salty. B) It has very little water and a lot of sugar. C) It is boiled before bottling. D) Bees add a preservative. Answer: B. With so little water available, microbes struggle to grow in it. Honey can crystallise over time, but that is a change in texture, not spoilage.
10. Which of these is a legume, not a true nut? A) Peanut. B) Hazelnut. C) Chestnut. D) Walnut. Answer: A. Peanuts grow in pods underground and are relatives of beans and lentils.
11. What is the main ingredient in hummus? A) Lentils. B) Chickpeas. C) White beans. D) Sesame seeds. Answer: B. Chickpeas. Sesame is in there too, as tahini, but it is not the bulk of the dish.
12. How is paneer made? A) By ageing milk with mould. B) By curdling hot milk with something sour, such as lemon juice. C) By churning cream. D) By fermenting soybeans. Answer: B. The acid splits the milk into curds and whey, and the curds are pressed into a block. Fermented soybeans would give you something closer to tempeh.
Where this does not work
This is a casual round, not diet or allergy advice. If someone at the table has a food allergy, a quiz answer is not the place to learn what is safe. Production figures and rankings also change, so treat question 4 as "true when we checked" and look it up if it matters.
Use it in QuesMo
Each of these works as a four-option question in QuesMo, where a friend picks an answer and sees whether they got it. To write your own, see make one good four-option question. Want another round? Try the everyday science questions or the geography questions.