Every question here exists because the same handful of misconceptions come up in almost every conversation about eating animals. This section unpacks the evidence behind the answers, so the quiz is a starting point rather than a scoreboard.
Why myths about diet survive so well
Food beliefs are formed early, reinforced daily by family habit and marketing, and rarely tested against data. Industry communication also plays a measurable role: dairy and meat marketing boards spend hundreds of millions each year on nutrition messaging, and much of the imagery used — open pasture, small barns, a single farmer with a handful of animals — describes a production system that supplies a tiny fraction of what people actually buy. When the picture in your head and the picture in the supply chain diverge that far, ordinary intuition stops being a reliable guide.
Protein is the most common sticking point
Adults need roughly 0.8–1.0 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, and more if they train hard — around 1.4–2.0 g/kg. A cup of cooked lentils supplies about 18 g, 150 g of firm tofu about 17 g, 100 g of seitan about 25 g, and a bowl of oats with soy milk around 15 g. Reaching 60–120 g a day from plants is arithmetic, not athletic feat. Where plant-based eaters do need to pay attention is variety and total calories: protein needs are easy to miss on a diet built mostly on fruit, salad and refined starch, regardless of whether animals are involved.
Scale is the hardest thing to intuit
Roughly 80 billion land animals and between one and three trillion fish are killed for food each year. Numbers at that scale stop feeling like quantities and start feeling like weather. One useful anchor: the average person eating a Western omnivorous diet is responsible for around 25–30 land animals a year, and many times that in aquatic animals. Another: livestock and their feed occupy about 77% of global farmland while supplying roughly 18% of calories. Both facts are boring on paper and decisive in practice.
Getting an answer wrong is the useful part
The questions people miss most often are the ones about water footprints, feed conversion and the share of soy grown for animals rather than humans — precisely the areas where public debate has the causal arrow pointing backwards. If you missed those, the linked sources are worth ten minutes; they change how supermarket shelves look.