Fruit and Vegetables Trivia
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174 free Fruit and Vegetables trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
60 free Fruit and Vegetables trivia questions with answers. This quiz digs into the produce aisle and comes back with surprises. Which everyday salad ingredient is legally a vegetable but botanically a berry? Which fruit was renamed in 1959 to get past customs officers? Which country grows almost all of the world's asparagus and spinach? Expect questions on origins, record-breaking specimens, odd etymologies, plant families that hide in plain sight, and the science of why onions make you cry. It is written for curious eaters, pub-quiz regulars, gardeners and anyone who has ever argued about whether a tomato is a fruit. Difficulty ranges from quick wins to genuinely tough questions about domestication and taxonomy. Every answer was checked against primary and reference sources such as Wikipedia, Guinness World Records and encyclopaedia entries, and each question carries the sentence that supports it, so you can trust the result and settle the argument.
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Q 01The 1893 Supreme Court ruling that tomatoes count as vegetables settled a dispute over what?
An import tariff
An import tariff: an 1883 law taxed imported vegetables but not fruit, so a New York importer sued to get his duties back, and the justices held that tomatoes are served with dinner, not as dessert.
Q 02The likely wild ancestor of the tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium, is native to which region?
Western South America
Western South America: the small-fruited currant tomato still grows wild in Peru and Ecuador, and breeders cross it into garden tomatoes to add resistance to pests and diseases.
Q 03Widespread infections of what forced the Gros Michel banana to be replaced by the Cavendish?
Panama disease
Panama disease, a soil-borne Fusarium fungus, wiped out Gros Michel plantations in the 1950s; its Tropical Race 4 strain now threatens the replacement Cavendish in the same way.
Q 04The Cavendish banana got its name from plants raised in the 1830s where?
A duke's greenhouse
A duke's greenhouse: Joseph Paxton, head gardener at Chatsworth House, raised a plant imported from Mauritius and named it after his employer, the Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish, before stock went on to the Pacific.
Q 05Bananas are very slightly radioactive because of which naturally occurring isotope?
Potassium-40
Potassium-40 is a naturally radioactive form of the potassium bananas are rich in, yet the dose is so small that it would take about 100 bananas to equal one day of ordinary background radiation.
Q 06Although it is often called a tree, the banana plant is botanically what?
A giant herb
A giant herb: the 'trunk' is a false stem of tightly wrapped leaf bases with no wood in it, and each one is cut down after bearing a single bunch so that a new shoot can take its place.
Q 07Botanically, a strawberry is not a true berry but what kind of fruit?
An aggregate accessory fruit
An aggregate accessory fruit: the red flesh is the swollen base of the flower, and each 'seed' on the outside is really a tiny separate fruit, an achene, with the true seed inside it.
Q 08The modern garden strawberry was first bred in the 1750s in which region of France?
Brittany
Brittany: the garden strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa, arose there in the 1750s from a cross of the North American Fragaria virginiana with the large-fruited Chilean Fragaria chiloensis.
Q 09Pre-Columbian farmers first domesticated the potato in the highlands around which body of water?
Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca: farmers on the high plain around it learned to freeze-dry potatoes on frosty nights into chuño, which the Incas later stockpiled to feed their soldiers and to tide people over after failed harvests.
Q 10Which plant family contains the genus Solanum, home to both potatoes and tomatoes?
The nightshades
The nightshades, Solanaceae, also include peppers, tobacco and deadly nightshade, and potatoes that have turned green contain the toxin solanine, which is why they should not be eaten.
Q 11What kind of organism is Phytophthora infestans, the late blight behind the Great Irish Famine?
A fungus-like oomycete
A fungus-like oomycete: water moulds grow and feed like fungi, but their cell walls lack the chitin of true fungi and their kin are brown algae and diatoms, not mushrooms.
Q 12When carrots were first cultivated, which parts of the plant were they grown for?
The leaves and seeds
The leaves and seeds: early growers wanted the aromatic foliage and seeds, as cooks still do with the carrot's relatives parsley, dill, fennel and cumin, and the fat sweet root was bred much later.
Q 13Growers in which country are credited with developing the orange carrot that became today's standard?
Q 21Before 1959, what was the kiwifruit generally called in English?
Chinese gooseberry
Chinese gooseberry: the vine reached New Zealand from China, and in 1959 the exporter Turners & Growers rebranded its fruit 'kiwifruit' to sell it in the United States, where the new name stuck.
Q 22Dictionaries trace the word 'grenade' to the French name of which fruit?
Pomegranate
Pomegranate: 'grenade' is the French word for the fruit, lent to the small bomb probably for its shape or its seed-like filling, and 'pomegranate' itself means 'apple with many seeds'.
Q 23'Avocado' comes from the Spanish 'aguacate', which in turn derives from which language?
Nahuatl
The Netherlands
The Netherlands: early cultivated carrots were purple or yellow until Dutch growers bred the orange kind, a colour often linked, on thin evidence, to the House of Orange.
Q 14What was the real reason for the WWII RAF night-fighter successes credited to carrots?
Newly adopted radar
Newly adopted radar: airborne interception radar let RAF night fighters find German bombers in the dark, and the carrot story gave that secret a cover; the night-vision myth has outlived the war.
Q 15Malus sieversii, the domestic apple's wild ancestor, still grows in which part of the world?
Central Asia
Central Asia: wild groves still grow in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan, and apples carried west along the Silk Road picked up genes from wild crabapples on the way to Europe.
Q 16Why are apple varieties grafted, not grown from seed?
Seedlings differ
Seedlings differ from their parent, and from one another, because every pip is a fresh genetic mix, so each Gala or Fuji tree is a clone grown from wood of the original.
Q 17The watermelon's closest wild relative, the Kordofan melon, grows on which continent?
Africa
Africa: a 2021 genome study found the pale-fleshed Kordofan melon of Sudan to be the watermelon's nearest kin, overturning a 90-year-old belief that it descended from a wild melon of South Africa.
Q 18Oklahoma's legislature gave the watermelon which official title in 2007?
State vegetable
State vegetable: the strawberry was already the state fruit, and the bill's sponsor, whose district around Rush Springs grows the crop, argued that it belongs to the gourd family.
Q 19Which state's official state fruit, chosen in 2009, is the tomato?
Ohio
Ohio: the state named the tomato its official fruit in 2009, the same year it made the pawpaw its official native fruit, leaving it with two official fruits.
Q 20Which American scientist urged Southern farmers to grow peanuts and devised hundreds of uses for the crop?
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver wanted farmers to rotate cotton with peanuts and sweet potatoes because years of cotton had worn out the soil, then found new products for the crops so growers could sell them.
Nahuatl: the Aztec word ahuacatl became Spanish aguacate, which was probably bent toward avocado, an old Spanish word for lawyer, before English speakers mangled it further into 'alligator pear'.
Q 24Which avocado variety, now the most widely eaten, descends from one tree planted by a California mail carrier in 1926?
Hass
Hass: postman Rudolph Hass thought of cutting the seedling down when his grafts failed, but his children liked its bumpy fruit; he patented the tree in 1935 and earned under $5,000 from it.
Q 25Because of its powerful smell, the durian is banned on some public transport in which region?
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia: Singapore's metro bars the fruit, whose smell has been likened to turpentine, onions and gym socks, yet devotees prize the sweet, custard-like flesh inside.
Q 26What does 'duri', the Malay root of the word 'durian', mean?
Thorn
Thorn: the fruit is named for its spiked rind rather than its notorious smell, and Malay adds the ending -an to turn the word into a noun, roughly 'the thorny one'.
Q 27Broccoli, cauliflower, kale and Brussels sprouts were all bred from which single plant?
Wild cabbage
Wild cabbage: growers selecting the same species for its flower heads, its leaves or its tight side buds turned one plant into vegetables that look nothing alike.
Q 28The Yubari King, sold in pairs at Japanese auctions for millions of yen, is a prized variety of which fruit?
Melon
Melon: grown in greenhouses in the town of Yubari on Hokkaido, the fruit is a favourite summer gift, and buyers bid up the season's first pair for the prestige of winning it.
Q 29Before pumpkins took over in America, Irish jack-o'-lanterns were traditionally carved from which vegetable?
Turnip
Turnip: in Ireland faces were cut into hollowed turnips to frighten off the wandering soul of Stingy Jack, and immigrants to the United States switched to the pumpkins they found growing there.
Q 30Rhubarb leaves are poisonous mainly because they contain high levels of which substance?
Oxalic acid
Oxalic acid: rhubarb leaves hold enough of it to damage the kidneys, so only the stalks, technically petioles, are eaten and the leaves are cut off before the plant reaches the kitchen.