A few years ago, I was working on a story about bread soup when I stumbled upon a gold mine of culinary research called the Food Timeline. An obsessively catalogued, exhaustively comprehensive resource on the history of food, the Food Timeline is a lo-fi website free from advertising, where anyone can learn about the origins of what we eat from 17,000 B.C. onward. Want to know about how marshmallows came to be? Curious about the first appearance of sorghum in our diets? It’s all there. The page on soup alone contains over 70,000 words from primary sources, cataloged in breathless detail.