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?
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?
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.
Something something elevation and atmospheric pressure resulting in a proper measurement across altitude… Or something.
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.
We like mixing them up too. Tyres are measured using three numbers, two of which are in mm, the other (wheel diameter) is in inches.
Not completely, agreed, but they are miles ahead of the Americans. :-)
8 ounces to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon.
And now to commit that to memory for the nth time…and immediately forget it.