So I went to
Whole Foods today to get some pork for a recipe I was making. As the recipe was written here in imperial, I asked for the 12oz of pork it required. It's amazing how ordering in imperial here can get you the same looks as ordering in metric. The butchers only expect pounds or some fraction/decimal of a pound and that's all they're setup for (specifically, decimals of a pound) so it took a second for him to work out that this was 0.75lb.
Cooking here is a bit of a challenge if you've not manged to memorize an amazing number of random numbers. Let's start with fluids...
Most recipes measure in teaspoons, tablespoons and cups (and sometimes solids like butter are measured in tablespoons, but that's mostly because it's marked on the side of a stick of butter). Unfortunately, when you buy something it's measured in fluid ounces, pints or gallons.
Now, some quick math, if you've got a recipe that asks for 3 cups and a bottle that says "1 pint, 6 fl oz" on it. Do you have enough?
Well, the math you need to do goes something like this:
- 1 cup is 8 fl oz
- 1 pint is 16 fl oz
- 3 cups is 24 fl oz
- 1 pint, 6 fl oz is 22 fl oz so you're short.
Now, you might be able to short circuit it as:
- Need 1.5 pints
- 1 pint, 6 fl oz is 2 fl oz short of 1.5 pints
Contrast this to the metric version of:
- Need 700ml
- Bottle has 500ml so we're short
And you begin to wonder why people look at you funny when you suggest that metric is easier and we should change.
Now we get the bizarre weight items. A can of liquid would be expected to be in a fluid measurement right? Well, not always. Chicken stock for instance comes in 14 oz (by weight, but your best indicator of this is the 396g description).
So, I need 5 cups of chicken stock and I have 14 oz by weight, do I have enough?
The short answer is no, but you're not going to be able to guess unless you've memorized the specific gravity of chicken stock...
Apart from that, weights basically come down to pounds and ounces and as long as you can remember the 16x conversion factor you're ok. Unless (and there's always an exception isn't there), you want to measure one of the things that has it's own system (like gold). The age old question of what weighs more x of gold or x of feathers is still a trick question if you're in the USA.
- 1 oz of gold comes to 31.10g (troy ounces)
- 1 oz of feathers comes to 28.35g
So, an ounce of gold really does weigh more than an ounce of feathers. Why keep it simple when you can make it possible to rip people off by adding complexity?
Finally, we come to distance. While I don't bump into distance measure issues when buying things on a daily basis (it's not that often I purchase furniture after all), it's still an annoying anachronism. While most Americans will measure in feet (and most pre-metric Brits use yards), there's a whole array of random numbers you've got to memorize or be willing to look stupid when they're used.
Let's take a recent flight I had for example. The hostess gave the distance to our destination in nautical miles. Now, this is commonly used in flight (and on the water) but not used _anywhere_ else. Thus, this number is useless to most of the population.
If you do happen to fly here, you can expect to be able to have to do calculations between feet, nautical miles, statute miles and meters as they're all used depending on what you're measuring. Of course, there's also the usual mix of metric and imperial in that you'll find altimeter settings in inches of mercury but sea level pressure in hectopascals. Good luck doing that one in your head.
Then there's the mile being a random number. 5280 feet or 1760 yards (no, it's not random, but it may as well be if you want to do a calculation with it). Most folks will tell you that not being able to do feet or yards to miles isn't an issue, but they don't use it because they can't not because it's not useful. Again, there's also the issue of measuring two things having different distances based on what you're measuring. If it's land, it's a survey mile and different from a statute mile (by 0.003 meters!!).
So, here we are in the 21st century, still using a measurement system that most of the rest of the world ditched 20+ years ago and still being confused by it on a daily basis. It's about time we changed....
