Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
Apparently the French sent over a metric system for the Americans to use, but the ship was lost.
I’ve seen numerous sources for this.
OP is asking about volume vs weight, not metric volume vs imperial volume.
Watch some cooking shows on YouTube where they cook from two hundred year old cookbooks. Weighing stuff is a modern thing. All the “ye olde recipes” from Europe and the colonies were done in cups, spoons, and some other volume measurements we don’t use anymore like “jills”. (If they even bother to specify meaurements.)
Bartenders routinely measure mixed drink additives in “barspoons”.
My grandmother in law has a biscuit recipe that starts with “fill the bowl with flour”. What bowl? The bowl she’s been making biscuits with for 50 years.
Point is, people left to their own devices will use whatever measurement is handy.
The imperial system is a nightmare. A lot of us hate it and agree that metric is far easier. I grew up with the imperial system and still don’t know the conversions between quarts, pints, ounces, and cups. Blame the French and British, we got it from them!
I’m currently calorie counting in order to lose weight and I weigh everything in grams because it’s easier.
This isn’t about imperial vs metric, it’s about measuring by mass vs volume. A good example here is flour. Weighing out 30 grams (or about 1 ounce) of flour will always result in the same amount. On the other hand, you can densely pack flour into a 1/4 cup measuring cup, you can gingerly spoon it in little by little, or you can scoop and level. When you do this you’ll get three different amounts of flour, even though they all fill that 1/4 cup. Good luck consistently measuring from scoop to scoop even if you use the same method for each scoop.
Jokes on you. When we measure flour on the moon, it’s the same as on earth. You just don’t understand our advance measurement technique with your primitive weighing.
Joke aside, scales on earth measure force and show mass on the assumption of the gravitational pull on earth. On a moon colony, you’d use measuring scales with a different value for the gravitational pull, and get the same values for mass as on earth.
Edit: Also, if anyone finds this stuff interesting to think about. You can measure mass without any force of gravity, but having the measuring device accelerate (e.g. shake) the stuff you want to measure. From “F=ma”, knowing F and a, you get m.
Blame the French and British, we got it from them!
Like 99% of the world, the French and British long ago managed to overcome the imperial system. Actually, the French spearheaded the metric world.
America just failed, time and again, to follow the times.
The british didn’t quite overcome the old ways of measuring. They still use miles, pints, stone, and so on.
Companies just need to print the metric amount on the box as well.
I am converting my life to metric, actually. All of my CAD work is in metric and all of my chemistry glass is thankfully in metric. Thinking in longer distances is something I need to get used to though.
The imperial system is just a waste of time, TBH. I am sure there are a ton of people that can work fractions in their head but I just gotta ask: Why, and what is the point?
Measuring and planning with metric is just so damn easy and no extra steps are generally needed. When I need to convert 1000mm I just move the decimal over a bit and get 1km. EZ.
When I need to convert 1000mm I just move the decimal over a bit and get 1km. EZ.
🤔
I keep using this example: In the wood shop, I’m going to cut a bridle joint. Requires cutting boards into thirds of their thickness. Metric lumber is often milled to 19mm thick. What’s a third of 19mm? You want to show me which line means 6.3333mm on a metric tape measure? US Customary lumber is milled to 3/4" thick. What’s a third of 3/4"? You want to show me which line means 1/4" on an inch tape measure? Now let’s cut a half-lap joint in that same lumber. In metric that works out to 9.5mm, there’s also no line on a typical metric tape measure for that. But there is a line for 3/8".
I’d much rather build furniture in inches than millimeters because in the wood shop I have to divide or multiply by powers of 2, 3 and 4 way more often than powers of 10. It is in this context that the inch standard which is subdivided by powers of two rather than ten arose, and it still works very well.
Metric users often correctly accuse Imperial or US Customary (though the two share names of units they are not identical) users of making excuses or relying on workarounds, in the context of woodworking joinery I find it’s the reverse. “Of course we don’t use 6.3333mm, you just know to cut the cheeks 6mm and the tongue 7mm. 6+6+7 is 19.”
I’ll grant you, doing stoichiometry in ounces and pounds would be a fucking nightmare. But woodworking joinery? Nah I’m doing that in fractional inches.
While neat, I believe your lumber example is misleading in the context of metric vs imperial. Woodworking is extremely imprecise compared to many other types of engineering and using that system for those problems may be ideal.
Deliberately using 1/3rd of 19mm to get 6.33333mm is not as a complex problem as it may look at first glance. 6.333mm IS 1/3rd of 19mm just with more precision. The nature of woodworking requires fairly large tolerances and .3333mm is likely within any tolerance range you would work with. Hell, even +/-3.333mm (10x) is probably within spec in many cases.
Your example conversion from 1/4in to 9.5mm is irrelevant unless you are working a project that is deliberately converting imperial to metric. If a project is designed in metric the measurements and reference points are going to be rounded to metric. The same goes for designs that are in imperial. While it’s possible to design identical pieces in each measuring system, it’s not ideal. Tolerance can compensate for most small differences and you will get two extremely similar pieces.
From your standpoint, everything has been imperial and you make design choices around how imperial works. It just makes sense to you. Design conversions from imperial to metric won’t make any sense and the “natural math” of each system is lost. If you were raised on metric, the same situation would apply I suppose.
You explained the biggest complaint of imperial as a positive: fractions. Pure math is just easier then fractions when working up and down ranges of precision. Divide 10cm by 2? 5mm. 5mm by 4? 1.25mm, etc… Problems like 19mm/3 are irrelevant because of allowable tolerance. Every exact measurement is not abstracted by a 16th or 8th or 32nd or 64th…
Admittedly, I am no woodworker. However, I am curious if someone from the EU could chime in on this problem from their perspective.
I have to admit: That sounds pretty nice. Next time I build something with wood I will try to use inches. Thanks!
This is why I think the metric system should be redone in base 12. Or maybe base 36.
I mean, you can make the exact same argument the other way round.
My bed is made with boards of 27mm thickness. One third of that would be 9mm. Easy.
Also if you need precision, calipers go down to 50um (micrometer), 1/20th of a mm.
The occasional shit-loads, sure. But dealing with metric fuck-tons is a pain in the ass.
Not really. Most every hardware shop has them these days. Amazon is about my only other source, but quality/usability is a gamble in the M1-M2 range for some reason. The number of small bolts and nuts in that range that are cast badly seems to be high for me. That seems really odd, actually.
Kits are the way to go, usually. I have a full assortment of nuts and bolts from M1 up to about M6 at many different lengths. I started building a collection when I was modding 3D printers but use them for any other random project these days.
Edit: Local hardware shops generally carry decent assortments from M3 and up. It’s more expensive than Amazon but is great if I only need one odd larger size for something random.
I find specific situations where customary units are handy. Fahrenheit has a nicer range for precise cooking temperature, such as for sous vide. 1 degree centigrade is a wider range than 1 degree fahrenheit. Dropping down to milligrades is too precise. Fahrenheit is just right.
Metric is lashed to orders of magnitude precision, and it gets in the way here. Being able to convert things, like knowing how much energy it takes to heat 1 cubic centimeter of water by 1 degree centigrade, also isn’t useful in the kitchen unless you’re doing some deep molecular gastronomy shit.
It’s OK to use different measurement systems in different contexts. Purity is not a virtue.
8 ounces to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon.
“Do Americans not own scales or something?”
For a good long while, no they didn’t. For a large fraction of American history a typical home kitchen had no bespoke measuring equipment at all; but tea cups, tea spoons and table spoons were typically available and made to pretty similar sizes, plus if you always used the same ones the proportions would be roughly the same, so meh.
A lot of traditional recipes were written this way, and it has remained so by tradition. A system of inexpensive, easy to manufacture measuring cups and spoons became standard equipment by the mid-20th century, and hasn’t changed to this day because it works just fine.
The US government is in the habit of publishing recipes with a deliberately low minimum equipment list. The United States Department of Agriculture for example conducts extensive testing on home canning recipes and methods, and deliberately writes their recipes to be used in poorly equipped kitchens, because the kind of folks who rely on putting up home grown vegetables for the winter don’t tend to spend a lot of money on Sharper Image kitchen gadgetry. Flipping through my copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, I find about a third of recipes could be made using nothing but a mason jar or two as your only measuring tool, as most mason jars (excluding the deliberately decorative ones) have graduation marks in cups, ounces and milliliters molded into them.
Most Americans I know don’t even have a scale in their kitchen!
I (an American) always wonder what a cup of spinach is. Like I can really pack it into a cup or not and there is a huge difference.
The things people drink out of are many different sizes of course, but when the word “cup” is used in the context of a measure of volume, then yes, they’re called “measuring cups”, and the volume is standardized.
Same thing with teaspoons and tablespoons. They’re not just any random spoon - when talking about measurements, they have a standardized volume and you need to use a cheap and ubiquitous measuring device if you want to follow a recipe precisely.
Most people in USA do not have a scale in their kitchen, but we do have a measuring cup and a set of measuring spoons.
A measuring cup is a specific size, about 237mL. There’s a whole system of US measurements, actually:
3 teaspoons in a tablespoon
2 tablespoons in an ounce
8 ounces in a cup
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
4 quarts in a gallon
Not all cups are measuring cups; if you are having a cup of coffee that doesn’t mean your cup is exactly 8oz. You just infer from context that if someone is talking about ingredients then you should measure them with a measuring cup. (Very commonly you also see cups with graduated markings, which are US Imperial on one side and metric on the other, that go up to 2 cups/500mL.)
