This Viral Food Quiz May Change the Way You Look at Your Eating Style

Are you bothered by the sight of raw meat? If you find a hair in your salad, would you send it back? A new quiz testing food-related triggers for disgust is taking social media by storm, and if you’re a fan of other quirky internet personality tests, it's definitely worth taking.

 The Food Disgust Test was developed by Christina Hartmann and Michael Siegrist in association with the Technical University of Zurich and IDRlabs to measure a person’s threshold for taking risks when trying new foods. Although the test was published in March 2022, it's gone viral thanks to a tweet with 9.4 million views, with thousands of people sharing their results on social media.

How It Works

This free personality-type quiz has 32 questions broken into eight sections to help determine your food triggers. Translation: The test tells you how grossed out you get by certain food situations. The categories of triggers include animal flesh, hygiene, human contamination, mold, decaying fruit, fish, decaying vegetables, and insect contamination. It takes about two minutes to complete, and participants review a list of statements, recording their answers on a sliding scale from "agree" to "disagree."

Statements range from very basic to more out-there declarations, like: "I throw overripe fruit away" and "Dirty silverware disgusts me," to "I feel disgusted when I chew on irregular bits of animal meat" and "I would never eat those new snacks that are made from bugs."

When you get your results, you receive a percentage of your "food disgust average" and a circle chart showing which triggers affect you the most. It also offers reasoning behind having these triggers; for people with aversions to fish, the quiz explains: "This type of disgust is thought to have developed as a response to the challenges of keeping fish meat fresh in prehistoric societies. Inland populations may also have had a hard time learning to trust fish meat as a source of nutrition," and "Disgust concerning vegetables has been observed to originate in childhood, and it is often difficult to change later in life."

Here's Why the Internet Is Divided 

While some of the questions are more universally understood to bring about a disgusted feeling, like hair on food or moldy bread, users quickly pointed out that some can be considered culturally biased.

For instance, one question asks how the user would feel about seeing a whole pig roasting on an open spit, which happens to be a delicacy of Latin American and Asian cuisine. Another section of the quiz is entirely devoted to raw fish, a staple in many food diets around the world.

“Growing up in a very Chinese family means I’m comfortable eating pretty much anything you put in front of me," user @jfwong said in a quote tweet. "I feel like mine would have scored higher if I wasn’t Turkish and conditioned to share food generously with others," wrote @Estelle_Lucas.

However, IDRlabs does seem to acknowledge this skewed basis in the results with a disclaimer that reads, “Of all the food disgust triggers, animal flesh is thought to have the most cultural basis, and many vegans and vegetarians report increased disgust on this parameter after adopting these diets.”

Should You Take the Test? 

If you want to learn about more about your eating style and how adventurous you're willing to be in trying different foods, this test is a great resource. Internet quizzes never go out of style and are often hard to scroll past, and the Food Disgust Test is no different—it’s a fun way to find out what kind of eater you truly are. You might even be surprised to find out how far you’ll go (or won't go) to satisfy your tastebuds.