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50 free Potato Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This potato trivia for kids quiz is written for children aged about 7 to 12 and for the grown-ups reading it out. It covers where potatoes first came from, why a potato is really a swollen underground stem, what the 'eyes' are for, why potatoes go green in the light, and how the Spanish carried them to Europe. Then it moves on to the fun stuff: French fries, potato chips, mashed potato, tater tots, hash browns and poutine, plus Mr. Potato Head, the first toy ever advertised on television. Every question can be answered by a curious kid, and each answer comes with a short fun fact, like the queen who wore potato flowers in her hair and the king who ordered his farmers to plant them. There is nothing scary in here. It works for a classroom food lesson, a kitchen quiz while dinner cooks, or a car ride. All the answers were checked against Wikipedia and food references, so parents and teachers can trust them. All 50 questions are free with no sign-up. Grown-ups who want a tougher round can try our main Potatoes trivia page or the Potato Chip quiz.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which part of the potato plant is the potato we eat?
A swollen underground stem
It is called a tuber. The plant uses it to store food for itself, which is why it is so full of starch.
Q 02Where in the world did people first grow potatoes?
The Andes mountains of South America
Farmers near Lake Titicaca, in what is now Peru and Bolivia, were growing them thousands of years before the pyramids were built.
Q 03Roughly how long ago were potatoes first farmed?
7,000 to 10,000 years ago
That is older than the pyramids of Egypt. All today's potatoes come from that one early wild species.
Q 04Which explorers first brought potatoes across the ocean to Europe?
The Spanish
They came back with them after conquering the Inca Empire in the 1500s. Europeans took a long time to trust the strange new food.
Q 05Potatoes are cousins of which other food plant?
The tomato
Both belong to a plant family called the nightshades. After flowering, a potato plant even grows little green fruits that look like tiny green tomatoes.
Q 06What are the little dents on a potato called?
Eyes
Each one protects a tiny bud. If you leave a potato in a cupboard, new shoots grow out of them.
Q 07Why do farmers keep potatoes covered up in the dark?
Light turns them green and bitter
Green potato skin contains a bitter chemical called solanine that the plant makes to protect itself, so green bits should be cut away.
Q 08About how many different kinds of potato are there in the world?
More than 5,000
Around 3,000 of them grow in the Andes alone. A seed bank in Lima, Peru keeps nearly 5,000 types safe.
Q 09Which country grew the most potatoes in the world in 2024?
China
China grew almost a quarter of the world's 390 million tonnes in 2024, and India was second.
Q 10How tall does a potato plant grow above the ground?
Up to about 1 metre (3 feet)
It has hairy stems and pretty flowers with yellow centres.
Q 11What colours can potato flowers be?
White, pink, blue or purple
They are yellow in the middle and pollinated by insects. A French queen once wore them in her hair to make potatoes fashionable.
Q 12Which French queen wore potato flowers to make people like the new vegetable?
Marie Antoinette
She and King Louis XVI wore the blossoms in their everyday clothes to show off the plant. Before that, the French thought potatoes were only fit for pigs.
Q 13Which king of Prussia ordered his farmers to grow potatoes in 1756?
Frederick the Great
Q 21In Britain and Ireland, what do people call potato chips?
Crisps
Confusingly, in Britain 'chips' means the thick fried potatoes Americans call fries.
Q 22A famous legend says potato chips were invented in 1853 by a cook in which New York town?
Saratoga Springs
The story goes that a grumpy customer kept sending back his fried potatoes, so the cook sliced them paper-thin. Historians now think the tale is a myth, but the name 'Saratoga Chips' stuck for years.
Q 23What was the very first flavoured potato chip, invented in Ireland in 1954?
Cheese and onion
Joe 'Spud' Murphy of the Tayto company made it. Before that, chips came with a little twist of salt in the bag.
His farmers were suspicious of the strange lumpy plant, so he made growing it the law and handed out cuttings.
Q 14A French pharmacist called Parmentier first ate potatoes when he was locked up where?
In a Prussian prison
He was captured during a war and fed potatoes, which the French thought were pig food. He liked them and spent his life persuading France to eat them.
Q 15Which famous painter made a picture called The Potato Eaters in 1885?
Vincent van Gogh
It shows a poor family sharing a plate of potatoes by lamplight. He wanted to paint country people exactly as they were.
Q 16In the Andes, people make chuño by doing what to potatoes?
Freezing them at night and drying them in the sun
The freeze-dried potatoes last for years. Inca soldiers carried them on long marches as a light, filling food.
Q 17In Inca stories, who was Axomamma?
The goddess of potatoes
She was a daughter of Pachamama, the earth mother. Potatoes mattered so much in the Andes that they had their own goddess.
Q 18Which country do most people think French fries really come from?
Belgium
One story says American soldiers in Belgium in the First World War called them French because the Belgian soldiers spoke French.
Q 19Which US president served 'potatoes in the French manner' at a White House dinner in 1802?
Thomas Jefferson
He had lived in France and loved French cooking. Fries are cooked twice: once to soften the inside, once to make the outside crispy.
Q 20Why are French fries usually fried twice?
First to cook the inside, then to make the outside crispy
The first fry is at a lower heat, the second at a higher heat for the golden crunch.
Q 24Pringles chips are a special curved shape so they stack. What did the inventor put them in?
A tube-shaped can
Chemist Fredric Baur spent two years designing the saddle-shaped chip in the 1950s to stop chips arriving broken and stale.
Q 25Which two things are usually mixed into mashed potato to make it creamy?
Milk and butter
Fluffy 'floury' potatoes make the best mash. In Britain it is just called 'mash'.
Q 26What do people in Britain call a potato baked whole in its skin?
A jacket
Because it is cooked in its skin, or jacket. The Incas baked potatoes long ago in an underground pit called a huatia.
Q 27Tater tots were invented in 1953 to use up what?
Leftover slivers of cut potato
The founders of the frozen food company Ore-Ida did not want to throw the scraps away, so they chopped them up, added flour and shaped them.
Q 28Hash browns are shredded fried potatoes usually eaten at which meal in America?
Breakfast
They are a diner classic, cooked on a big flat grill next to the eggs.
Q 29Poutine, a dish from Quebec, is fries topped with gravy and what?
Cheese curds
It appeared in the 1950s in Quebec, and several towns still argue about who made it first.
Q 30Gnocchi are little potato dumplings from which country?
Italy
The dough is usually just potato, flour, egg and salt, rolled into small pieces and boiled like pasta.