Ingredient Food Game in Canada: Allergen Rung

Picture a ladder of seven rungs leaning against one dish. That is the Ingredient food game in Canada: a single dish a day, seven four-option questions climbing from easy to expert, and a thousand points for each right answer. The final rung always turns to allergens, using a list drawn up for Canada.

How does the Ingredient food game in Canada work?

Start at the bottom with the dish of the day and answer upward. Every rung offers four choices. You must answer all seven, so a stumble on rung three does not remove rung four. When you are wrong, the game reveals the right option and lets you carry on.

Nothing about a rung you have not reached is stored on your phone. The server holds the answers and checks each one as you go, which is why the game can promise there is nothing to peek at. Your running total, out of seven thousand, shows at the top, and a clean sweep is called the top of the ladder.

Canadian priority allergens in Ingredient

The last question is built from the allergen list of the market you play in. In Canada that is Health Canada's priority allergens, eleven in all: eggs, fish, crustaceans and molluscs, milk, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soy, sulphites, tree nuts, and wheat and triticale. Mustard, molluscs and sulphites stand out, because the American list of nine does not name them.

The French game uses the wording of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for these names, so you will meet forms such as Poissons and Blé et triticale. Tree nuts become noix. In the game's own rules, pine nuts are counted as tree nuts for Canada.

What does the None of these option do?

Rung seven always offers it. If the dish carries nothing from the Canadian list, None of these is the answer. About one dish in three also gets None of these as a decoy, where it is wrong, so it is never a free pass. Wrong allergens are chosen with care: none is one that a common version of the dish would contain.

Treat all of this as a quiz. Menus differ from textbook recipes, and the place that serves your dinner is the only reliable source about what is in it.

What do the seven rungs ask?

Early rungs lean on kitchen common sense, such as what a dish is based on. Middle rungs ask about method or a detail most eaters never think about. The top rungs reward someone who has cooked the dish. Each question traces to a named source, and the options are written to be believable.

The designers also avoid giveaways. The correct option is not always the longest, and a decoy is never a variation cooks commonly make. If an answer sounds like a sensible tweak, suspect it.

Is Ingredient available in French?

Yes. The game runs in Canadian French, with Quebec wording in dish names and the allergen labels described above. Some longer passages, such as question wording and the titles of sources, may still show in English while the translation work continues, so look at what your own screen says if you play in French.

A day on the ladder, step by step

Say the dish is a rich stew. Rung one asks what it is built on, and you answer in a second. Rung two asks how it is usually served. By rung four the question is about technique, such as what is added late or what is left out. Rung five or six tests a detail only a cook would know. Then rung seven asks which allergen the dish contains, with four options and the None of these choice among them.

Read all four options each time. The wrong ones are written to sound reasonable, so a quick glance can cost you a thousand points, while ten seconds of thought often saves it.

A strategy for the ladder

Go quickly through the first three rungs. Slow down at four, five and six, where the decoys are strongest. On the allergen rung, picture the classic recipe: butter or cream suggests milk, noodles or bread suggest wheat, a sharp dressing may mean mustard, a seafood broth may mean molluscs or crustaceans. If nothing fits, weigh the decoy risk before choosing None of these.

A finished game of any score keeps your streak alive, so a hard day costs nothing. The stats for Ingredient list games played, average score, best score and streak, and they leave out a win rate.

Who is Ingredient for?

Anyone who cooks, and anyone who wants to. Curious eaters get a gentle education in how dishes are put together, and cooks get a small test of what they know. Because every question is played, even a bad day delivers seven chances to learn something, and the correct option is always shown after a miss.

What the ladder teaches about eating out

Breaking a dish into parts makes you a sharper orderer and a sharper rater. If you can say what a dish is made from, your rating says more than stars alone.

Mosey is a food app for finding, rating and sharing places to eat. It is free for a place to list, has no hidden fees and keeps its tools affordable for small kitchens, so rating a dish by name is a free way to back them. Add tags, keep a list of dishes to try with a friend, and follow people whose taste you trust.

The Canadian daily food games overview covers all three puzzles, and the Ladle guide explains the dish puzzle. The daily food games page sums them up, and the Canadian food guides list where to eat.

Streaks and the weekly league are covered in the streaks and league guide.

Open the Mosey app, climb today's ladder and rate the next dish you eat by name.