Vegan Trivia
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105 free Vegan trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
54 free vegan trivia questions with answers, written for anyone who wants more than a Veganuary quiz. The questions cover the word itself (coined in 1944 from the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian'), the newsletter that launched the movement, the American societies that followed, and the moment plant milk went from a Leicester side project to a Nasdaq listing. There is a lot of food science in here too: what aquafaba actually is and which Latin words it was stitched from, the mould that turns soybeans into tempeh, the sixth-century Chinese encyclopedia that first described seitan, why the Impossible Burger bleeds, and where the pea protein in a Beyond Burger comes from. A run of questions on hidden animal ingredients (isinglass, carmine, shellac, gelatin) will trip up plenty of long-time vegans. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or a primary source before publishing, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Difficulty runs from easy openers on tofu and jackfruit to expert questions on 1849 cookbooks and Michelin stars, so the quiz works for a plant-based potluck as well as a serious pub round.
30 of 105 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'vegan' was coined in Britain during which war?
The Second World War
The Second World War was in its last year when a few vegetarians who also shunned milk and eggs, refused their own section of the Vegetarian Society, met in London and founded the Vegan Society.
Q 02Vegan singer Billie Eilish wore Oscar de la Renta to the 2021 Met Gala only once the label gave up what?
Fur
Fur: Eilish, a co-chair of that year's gala at 19, made a fur-free pledge her condition for wearing the gown, then publicly urged every other designer to do the same.
Q 03Who coined the word 'vegan'?
Donald Watson
Donald Watson, a woodwork teacher, coined 'vegan' with his future wife Dorothy Morgan, co-founded the Vegan Society and edited its first newsletter almost single-handed.
Q 04World Vegan Day falls on the day after which holiday?
Halloween
Halloween: World Vegan Day is 1 November, a date Vegan Society chair Louise Wallis picked partly because it sits beside Halloween and the Day of the Dead, traditional times of feasting.
Q 05What was the Vegan Society's first newsletter, a quarterly launched with the society, called?
The Vegan News
The Vegan News was the quarterly newsletter the society's founder produced himself; it was later retitled simply The Vegan.
Q 06Which name did Britain's first vegans weigh up and reject before settling on 'vegan'?
Dairyban
Dairyban was rejected along with 'vitan' and 'benevore'; the founders wanted one word more concise than the 'non-dairy' label they had been using.
Q 07The first vegan society in the United States was founded in 1948 in which state?
California
California: Catherine Nimmo and Rubin Abramowitz founded it at Oceano in 1948 and passed round the British society's newsletter; it lasted until a national society took over in 1960.
Q 08The American Vegan Society's founder built it around 'ahimsa', a Sanskrit word usually translated as what?
Non-violence
Non-violence: H. Jay Dinshah founded the society in 1960, three years after a visit to a Philadelphia slaughterhouse made him vow to work until every one was closed; he named its magazine Ahimsa.
Q 09Which Romantic poet published 'A Vindication of Natural Diet' in 1813?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley argued in the 1813 pamphlet that eating meat was unnatural; five years later his wife Mary had Frankenstein's creature say it lived on acorns and berries.
Q 10Asenath Nicholson, author of an early vegan cookbook in 1849, wrote an eyewitness account of which crisis?
Irish famine
Irish famine: Nicholson, whose recipe book has been called the first vegan cookbook, ran her own soup kitchen in Dublin in 1847 and published what she saw as Annals of the Famine.
Q 11Which organisation did Leslie Cross found in 1956 to develop a dairy-free milk?
The Plantmilk Society
The Plantmilk Society, founded by Leslie Cross in 1956, became Plantmilk Ltd in 1965 and made one of Britain's first widely sold soy milks; it later traded as Plamil.
Q 12Which news magazine declared 2019 'the year of the vegan'?
The Economist
The Economist made the call in its special edition 'The World in 2019'; within months Beyond Meat had floated on the stock market and Burger King was selling the Impossible Whopper nationwide.
Q 13The Herbivorous Butcher, billed as America's first vegan butcher shop, opened in 2016 in which Mississippi River city?
Minneapolis
Q 21The heme protein that makes an Impossible Burger 'bleed' is modelled on a molecule found naturally where?
In soybean roots
In soybean roots: Impossible's heme is soy leghemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of soybean root nodules, made at scale by genetically engineered yeast rather than harvested from plants.
Q 22The primary protein in Beyond Meat products comes from which plant?
Peas
Peas: Beyond Meat builds its burgers and sausages on pea protein, and adds red beet juice so that the raw patty 'bleeds' like beef.
Q 23Which meat giant sold its stake in Beyond Meat ahead of the plant-based firm's 2019 stock-market debut?
Tyson Foods
Minneapolis: siblings Aubry and Kale Walch began in 2014 with five meat-free products at the city's farmers market, and a fast-growing following carried them into a full storefront two years later.
Q 14Europe's first vegan supermarkets, Veganz and Vegilicious, opened in 2011 in which country?
Germany
Germany: Vegilicious opened in February 2011 in Dortmund, a blue-collar city better known for beer and bratwurst, and Veganz followed in Berlin that summer.
Q 15Which festival offered vegan dishes for the first time in its 200-year history in 2013?
Oktoberfest
Oktoberfest, the Munich beer festival famous for pork knuckle, sausages and roast meats, put vegan dishes on its menus for the first time in 2013.
Q 16Which tech founder was an early backer of both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods?
Bill Gates
Bill Gates was among the investors who put more than $150 million into Impossible Foods before it had served a single restaurant burger, and he backed Beyond Meat years before it went public.
Q 17Veganuary, the pledge to eat vegan for January, was founded in which historic northern English city?
York
York: Jane Land and her husband Matthew Glover launched Veganuary from their kitchen there in 2014, and by 2020 some 400,000 people a year were signing up.
Q 18Chef Claire Vallée's ONA won a Michelin star in 2021, the first for a vegan restaurant in which country?
France
France: Vallée opened ONA, short for Origine Non Animale, near Bordeaux in 2016 after a crowdfunding campaign, with more than 80 volunteers helping to fit it out.
Q 19The name 'aquafaba' was coined in 2015 from Latin words meaning what?
Water and bean
Water and bean: Goose Wohlt coined the name in 2015 after showing that the cooking liquid from garbanzo beans and sugar alone whip into an egg-free meringue.
Q 20Impossible Foods founder Patrick Brown was a biochemistry professor at which university when he started the company in 2011?
Stanford
Stanford: Brown spent an 18-month sabbatical asking how to do the most good, decided that farming animals for food was the biggest environmental problem he could tackle, and set out to build a rival product.
Tyson Foods bought 5% of Beyond Meat in 2016 but sold out before the flotation because it wanted to sell plant-based protein of its own; the shares then jumped 163% on their first day.
Q 24Beyond Meat's first product, sold at Whole Foods in 2012, imitated which meat?
Chicken
Chicken: the frozen strips used a formula licensed from two University of Missouri professors and arrived four years before the Beyond Burger; the company quietly dropped them in 2019.
Q 25Tempeh is a traditional fermented soybean food from which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia: tempeh comes from the island of Java, where it is a staple protein, and it is the only major traditional soy food that did not originate in China or Japan.
Q 26What kind of organism binds soybeans into a cake of tempeh?
A mould
A mould: Rhizopus oligosporus (or R. oryzae) sends white mycelial threads through the cooked soybeans and knits them into a firm cake.
Q 27Seitan, the chewy meat substitute, is made from what?
Wheat gluten
Wheat gluten: seitan is the stretchy mass left when wheat dough is washed in water until its starch rinses away; the result is chewy enough to be sold as 'wheat meat'.
Q 28The word 'seitan' was coined in 1961 by George Ohsawa, an advocate of which diet?
Macrobiotic
Macrobiotic: George Ohsawa, the diet's Japanese founder, coined 'seitan' in 1961, and the word reached English within a decade, after an American health-food company began importing the product.
Q 29What is the informal nickname for nutritional yeast?
Nooch
Nooch: nutritional yeast is grown on molasses and then killed with heat, which is why its nutty, cheesy-tasting flakes can season a dish but will never make dough rise.
Q 30When nutritional yeast contains vitamin B12, where does the vitamin come from?
It is added separately
It is added separately: yeast cannot make B12, so fortified brands add the vitamin during manufacturing, and unfortified flakes contain only what the yeast produced as it grew.