Research at the California Academy of Sciences

A Short Biography of Carl Austin Rietz

Collector of the Rietz Collection of Food Technology

Publication

In the early 1960s, although occupied with the expansion and relocation of Rietz Manufacturing to Santa Rosa, California, coupled with an extensive travel schedule, Rietz managed to author a treatise outlining a scientific approach to selecting, preparing, and cooking food. A Guide to The Selection, Combination, and Cooking of Foods: Vols. I and II, published in 1961, was co-authored with Jeremiah J. Wanderstock. The foreword, by Donald K. Tessler, describes the purpose of the project:

"This is not a cookbook, but rather a detailed discussion of food preparation and cooking, with the intent of placing routine procedures on a truly scientific basis."
(Rietz and Wanderstock: 1961, p.vii)

The Guide pursues a rational structure for the measurement of taste. Through the presentation of the "Gustametric Master Chart," described as "a common logarithmic scaling system," Rietz assigned a specific value to all foods in order to "determine quickly and exactly which combinations of foods make for agreeable meals."

Carl Austin Rietz's business card
Although his attempt to measure taste in respect to food was well intentioned, the unquantifiable and subjective variables of eating and cooking of which Rietz was highly aware proved difficult to gauge. Tradition, history, personal taste, religious proscription, environment and economy are only a few of the dynamics that influence how and what people eat.

Reduction to a codified system of values conceals the influence of such dynamics that cannot be quantified. However, given Rietz's passion and focus on the cultural diversity of food and its preparation, his attempt to construct a "nascent science of gustometry" seems more a desire to ground the study of food and taste in science than a willful negation of those aspects of food and culture that are difficult or impossible to measure.

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