One of the internet’s most extraordinary food documents has found a home in Virginia

Virginia is now home to one of the most extraordinary food documents ever compiled by a single human.

Perhaps, if you were curious one day about the invention of cheese, you’ve already found it. The Food Timeline is an endless scroll of food facts and recipes that looks like an artifact from the ancient Geocities days of the internet, a rose-tinted window onto the World Before Google.

But in its simplicity, the Timeline also contains multitudes.

Among its thousands of entries, you will learn that around 2002, the classic half-gallon container of ice cream shrank by a cup: Customers were told the new packaging eliminated “knuckle-muck.”

You’ll find that Heinz did in fact once boast 57 varieties, according to its 1930 “Book of Salads.” And in 1937, boxer Jack Dempsey hosted a cocktail party for dogs.

The ancient Romans thought the lemon a mere “curiosity and a decoration.” The conquistadors of Spain at first “flinched from chocolate” when they first encountered it among the Mayans. New World pumpkins, however, were quickly embraced by Europeans as a superior squash. In the 17th century, Europeans invented portable soup.

Oysters preceded almonds. Popcorn predated apricots. At the dawn of history, iced tea was a delicacy for the upper class. In America, indigenous bison hunting ruled for as many as a thousand years before India figured out cattle. The “Twecepe” — the 140-character Twitter recipe — was born in 2009.

In its range and depth, the Timeline is a dizzying document, a thoroughly researched and meticulously bibliographied world in which you can lose countless hours to the “tall food” trend of the ’80s or the mystery of the Monte Cristo sandwich. It seems like it must be the work of dozens, hundreds: The entry on soup alone boasts 70,000 fascinating words, gathered from primary sources that date back to the first cookbook by Apicius in Rome.

But over about 15 years, each of these tidbits was carefully and obsessively compiled by Lynne Olver, a reference librarian who lived in Randolph, New Jersey.

Starting around 1999, Olver taught herself HTML and built a website from scratch — still and forever findable at foodtimeline.org — and began arranging tens of thousands of years of food origins into a quirky timeline, mashing together the food lore of an entire globe into a scrollable list of Times New Roman hyperlinks. She pulled its words from a personal food library that swelled to 2,300 volumes, carefully documenting each primary source.

“The first thing (that) comes to mind is it’s like the Wikipedia of the food world,” said Lynne’s widower, Gordon Olver. “But Wikipedia hadn’t existed yet. She was kind of creating it from before — before a site like Wikipedia was even available.”

But unlike Wikipedia, whose citations sometimes dead-end in the apocryphal claims that have become the web’s most enduring specialty, the Timeline was reliably researched from academic food texts; Olver’s work has been cited in academic journals.

Depending on whom you ask, the Food Timeline is either obscure or legendary. It is, perhaps, both.

“Oh my God, it’s Nirvana,” said Linda Pelaccio, on her “Taste of the Past” podcast on Heritage Radio in 2013. By 2014, Olver’s website had been viewed at least 35 million times — and she had answered more than 25,000 questions from curious readers. Olver was consulted by newspapers from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, on matters as curious as the origin of the five-second rule for dropped food. (Her ruling: It remained a bit of a mystery, though she suspected sports.)

But as of last year, the Timeline was in limbo. It was a solitary project, and Olver passed away in 2015 at the age of 57, after a monthslong battle with leukemia. For years thereafter, her website’s links slowly untethered. Gordon tried repeatedly to seek out a steward to look after his wife’s defining work but didn’t know how to go about it.

But through a chain of events equally beholden to the internet, the Food Timeline has finally found its way to a new home: The library of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. There, it will remain a living document and a jewel in the tiara of the school’s new Food Studies program.

“This Timeline can spark people’s curiosity in a way that a lot of other resources just don’t,” said the Food Studies program director, Anna Zeide. “The magic of what she’s able to do is that she just was so moved — and passionate.”

But the Timeline almost didn’t find a place to go.

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A solitary passion

Gordon Olver knew his late wife’s website and food library couldn’t go just anywhere. It was, after all, the work of a life.

That said, it was a life’s work she’d never planned.

Raised as a New Yorker, Lynne had been instilled with curiosity from a young age by a Shakespeare-quoting father who took his children touring through museums. She collected cookbooks and had always been interested in food history, Gordon said. But she wasn’t what you’d call a foodie, even by ’90s standards. She could never quite bring herself to try sushi. She spurned squid or anything with untoward textures.

“My wife loved grilled cheese,” Gordon said. “And another one of her foods that she absolutely loved, she called it peas and cheese. It could be frozen peas, never canned, but frozen peas or fresh peas. You cook them up and then while they’re still hot, melt cheese over them, and eat them just like that. ... She loved it.”

The Food Timeline seems to have chosen her, as much as vice versa. It began when she posted about the first Thanksgiving dinner for the website of Morris County Library in Whippany, New Jersey, where she was an assistant reference librarian. Spurred by the interest it generated, she kept it going: Christmas recipes, recipes from Dickens.

Though she knew food never evolved in a simple straight line, she was inspired by a book the library had recently acquired — James Trager’s Food Chronology — to organize a food history as a downward-scrolling timeline cross-cutting the globe.

In an age when search engines were still a hit-or-miss affair, food lovers began to deluge her with obscure food questions. She dutifully set about answering each one, humbly using the royal “we” to deflect attention from herself — implying there might be a team of researchers. There wasn’t: The team was Lynne Olver.

“She was working probably 25 or 30% of her time on it at work,” Gordon said. “And the rest of the time she was at home on her own time.”

To avoid using public resources, she took care to print documents only at home, on her own printer. But by March of 1999, the library told her the web traffic was swamping their meager bandwidth. The timeline had to move. A friend at the library bought her a domain name so she could continue it on her own: foodtimeline.org.

The timeline took over her home life instead, as much as 30 hours a week. To answer the many questions, ranging from the cost of Cheez Whiz when it was introduced (59 cents) or the inventors of chewing gum (the Mayans), she began expanding her food library to epic proportions — with a little help from her family.

“The funny thing was if I used to buy gifts, she didn’t like perfume or jewelry or anything that most women like. She liked books,” Gordon said. “For Christmas and birthdays and holidays. I would buy her food books. And I could always go to her website and determine whether she already had the book because she had coded them. All I had to do is look and say, ‘Yep, she’s got that one. Forget about it.’ ”

She indexed each question she received with a librarian’s precision: Beans: Mung. Bratwurst — see: sausage.

And she pledged, against all likelihood, that she would answer any query within 48 hours. Her son Jason, who now runs his own food blog at olverindulgence.com, grew used to grilled cheese sandwiches with a bit of added charcoal after his mother forgot them on the stove while hard at work on her computer. Charred, just like Mom’s, is still how he likes them.

The food library slowly took over every bit of space in their home. She kept a file cabinet of food brochures and restaurant menus. Even the piano bench was filled with brochures. Noting that the Timeline took up so much of her life and was netting 17,000 hits a day — a huge number, at the time — Gordon asked his wife if maybe they should consider selling ads on the site.

“She was like. ‘That would bastardize the site. And I have no intention of doing that, and don’t ever talk to me about it again,’ ” Gordon said. “So I never brought it up again. Or, that’s not true — I probably did.”

But though she never took a dime, she did attain an underground form of celebrity. She became a consultant for America’s Test Kitchen. She did interviews with newspapers. A friend’s wife, upon learning what she did, told Gordon, “I feel like I’ve just had dinner with a rock star.”

When Lynne received a cooking class as a gift from her kids, renowned chef Cathy Kaufman told her class there was a celebrity in the classroom, Gordon said. Lynne looked around the room for the famous person.

“I just want everyone to know that Lynne Olver from the Food Timeline is here,” Kaufman told the class.

“Everyone’s jaw just dropped. And it was like: She was the celebrity in the room,” Gordon recounted this year, on an America’s Test Kitchen podcast about his wife. “I think she was a little embarrassed because she was so humble.”

But in 2014, Lynne received her cancer diagnosis. She’d known she was sick but hid it from her family because she didn’t want to take attention from her daughter’s wedding — a wedding she ultimately couldn’t attend. She spent it, instead, in the hospital.

By the spring of 2015, however, it looked like she was on the upswing. The Olvers never thought they’d ever need to make plans for what would happen to her website or her books.

“Until literally the morning that she passed away, we believed that she was going to survive,” Gordon said. “So I never asked her about it. We never even talked about it. I mean, I didn’t even say to her, ‘Do you want me to put together a living will?’ That is until the doctors urged us.”

Just weeks after the bone marrow transplant meant to save her life, she fell victim to a strain of bacteria that resisted every form of antibiotic. And on the morning of April 14, 2015, with very little warning, Lynne Olver left the world.

For a year, Gordon didn’t even try to think about what to do with the website that had occupied his wife for most of two decades. But eventually, he had to confront her legacy — and that massive collection of books.

“The only thing I knew for sure is that she didn’t want it to be sitting unused,” he said. “I looked at it like, ‘Don’t let that happen for five years. I’m not gonna let it go any longer if I can find a suitable place.’ And we wanted books to go with the site because the site is the way to keep her name alive forever. She had spent her life working on it — 15 years, 20 years. I couldn’t see having that just disappear.”

___

The search for a new home

But finding a curator proved difficult. Gordon knew of a few food institutions his wife held in high esteem, including the Culinary Institute of America.

But he had conditions. There couldn’t be ads on the website. The books would need to be freely accessible to the public. And the books and the site would need to go to the same place.

The CIA would happily take the books, Gordon said, but at the time they didn’t want stewardship of the website, and free public access was an issue. He ran into other brick walls with other institutions. For years, he wasn’t sure where to turn.

But in 2018, he had invited a freelance writer named Dayna Evans to talk to him at his home. Smitten with the Food Timeline after discovering it by accident while researching recipes for bread pudding, she had contacted him hoping to write a story about Lynne’s life. When the article arrived on the food website Eater in July 2020, it contained a touching and expansive tribute to Lynne’s life and work, and her significance to food lovers around the globe.

But it was also a call to action: “Who will save the Food Timeline?” the headline asked. “The internet’s most comprehensive archive of food history — a passion project of one dedicated librarian — predates Wikipedia. Now, it needs a new custodian.”

Among the many who read Evans’ article — destined for enshrinement in this year’s Best American Food Writing anthology — was a reference librarian named Kira Dietz, who had long overseen the 5,000-tome food collection at Virginia Tech. Soon, her inbox dinged.

“It was a Friday afternoon,” Dietz said. “A faculty member here from religion and culture emailed me and was like, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’ve seen this article yet … is this something we should go after?’ ”

The same day, a colleague who hadn’t yet started at the university — Anna Zeide — did the same. Dietz already knew and loved the Timeline, and was excited about the notion. The three met the next week and drew up a multi-disciplinary proposal.

“I heard back from the family and they said, ‘Well, we’ve heard from a lot of people, so we’re going to look. We’re going to consider our options and talk amongst ourselves, and then we’ll be in touch,’ ” Dietz said.

“And I thought, ‘Well, that’s the end of this.’ ”

Gordon was overwhelmed by the response after Evans’ article. He received 87 proposals of varying seriousness — including from prestigious institutions that had previously turned him down or ignored his entreaties. He and his daughter made a spreadsheet.

A beloved Food Network star, whom he declined to name for publication, had even called him up.

“My wife knew of him very well,” Gordon said. “The interesting thing was, though, she always thought he was kind of a wiseass.”

But Gordon and his son were both much bigger fans. They seriously considered the celebrity chef’s proposal and were touched by it. “I didn’t know until then just how loved she really was,” he said.

But in the end, the only place that had really drawn up a detailed and multidisciplinary proposal was Virginia Tech. And that’s who he called.

Dietz got the call “out of the blue,” she said. She’d already given up hope. “I’m pretty sure I said something like, ‘Oh… OK!’ ”

After months of talks, the move became a reality. The university drew up an agreement that Lynne’s books would be digitally watermarked as a special collection in the library’s system. Dietz and Zeide laid out their plans to not merely preserve the website but to keep its scholarship going.

The Olvers arranged for an assessor to determine the size of their gift: about $28,000 worth of books. Gordon hopes to use whatever tax break he receives to help set up a scholarship for future students, in Lynne’s name.

“The biggest hurdle at that point,” Dietz said, “was how do you move 95 boxes of books from New Jersey to Virginia during the pandemic?”

After many false starts, they got the books into the building. And after months of pandemic delays, the library is now busy cataloging the collection. Zeide’s new Food Studies program has inaugurated an internship so that there will be a student dedicated to working with the Food Timeline.

For Zeide, the Timeline occupies a special space in food scholarship: It’s a bridge between people’s natural interest in quirky food facts and the much broader cultural context that makes her so excited about food scholarship.

“Really, I think food is key to understanding … everything,” she said, laughing. “The Food Timeline is so cool at both being this curiosity magnet that might bring people in who just want to know about when chicken noodle soup was invented. But then as they start to read it, they start to see how you can connect the dots. So that creates this entry point to recognizing the broader import of food.”

But they don’t intend for the Timeline to be static. They plan to build on what Lynne Olver created, building connections across departments and adding layers of scholarship and context — and maybe a little technological know-how — to the little hand-coded site built by a librarian when the internet was new.

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Maybe they’ll add links to digitized pages from the books she once quoted. Maybe they’ll figure out easier ways to navigate through the timeline.

This may also involve a new interface, which Zeide said they hope to have complete by 2022. The budget isn’t large. But when news broke of the acquisition, offers poured out of the woodwork from people who want to volunteer their help, Dietz said.

But it’ll also be a balancing act, one they’ve yet to navigate in its entirety. Because for those who’ve loved it, the Timeline is a piece of history all to itself.

“That’s the question: How do we do this in a way that still respects what it was, and doesn’t take away from that?” Dietz said. “It’s a hard question. ... When we get to a point where the Timeline looks like something new, we definitely want to preserve this thing. Because that, in and of itself, is kind of iconic.”

As for Gordon Olver, he doesn’t mind if the website gets jazzed up a little. He’s just glad his late wife’s legacy will continue.

“If it looks a little bit different, that’s fine with us,” he said. “I said the most important thing is that she gets the credit forever. And they’re like: ‘You don’t even have to ask that. There’s no question about it.’ And they’ve been terrific.”