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IffThen comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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America should take up the metric system.
It's not a crazy idea at all; it's more on the field of "The world is a dumber place because this needs to happen and hasn't yet."
Metrication of industrial products: clear benefit.
Metrication of road signage: somewhat less clear benefit.
Metrication of kitchen units: no.
Why?
Metric uses weight in many cases where imperial uses volume. This makes the translation of old recipes into metric a chore. And it means you need a kitchen scale, something that a lot of of good cooks manage without in the US.
There are other barriers -- no one is going to replace their oven just because the numbers on the temperature knob don't match a new recipe (they might buy a new knob if it was easy enough, though!).
All in all, the arguments for not going to metric across the board is the same old "we'd rather have our kids deal with it". But fubarobfusco is correct, it is unlikely that it will happen in the next decade or so. The market clearly won't demand or accept it.
Cooking by weight is common in the UK, and it's superior for two reasons: One, it's more accurate, because it's unaffected by packing density. Two, it's quicker, because you can pour all the ingredients directly into one container, zeroing the scales between each one. Cooking by weight is standard for professional baking even in the US.
That's not an imperial/metric problem. And in the case of recipes, the most frequent volume units are a cup and a {tea|table}spoon -- these are neither imperial, nor metric. A US "cup" is around 240 ml.
Yes - you could have other translation problems if you liked. You could have recipes that called for 240ml of flour (although there are good reasons to go by weight); or you could have recipes that call of 3.5 oz. of flour. But right now we have a lot of recipes that are carefully designed to be easily measured under one system or another (75 g; 1/2 cup). Changing systems makes the measurements come out less conveniently, whichever way you choose to change them.
Of course, there are no shortage of recipes that do use the metric system, so basically this is a resistance to rotating out cookbooks.
You are correct about the terminology; technically, the system used in the U.S. is United States customary units. I have never heard that phrase spoken aloud, although this could be a problem with the people I speak to, rather than any indication of common usage.
[Edited to adjust for polymathwannabe's correction -- thank you. The 240 is what I intended, but the 250 was an error.]
The liter and its derived units are primarily used to measure liquids. For flour you use grams.
I use dl. I have one of the most popular Swedish cook books, and it consistently gives volumes of flour, baking soda etc.
If you implement that, you get what the UK has.
Totally agree.
Amusing story: I work at NIST this summer. They have posters that say things like "Think Metric" here, but the food scales in the cafeteria are still in pounds.
A good start would be using kitchen tools with both scales, and somehow try to make them popular.
Please post this in the next Open Thread.