A History of Measuring Frustration, in Grams
A short history on how the metric system was born and why it's better than the Imperial.
Have you ever picked up a cookbook and noticed that you need to decipher an entire page of ingredients to start cooking? Have you ever asked why the author (or editor or publishing house) felt their measurements are globally recognized as gospel truth? I cry, culinary blasphemer!
I decided to understand, once again, this time with great calm, why the world doesn't simply accept the metric measurement system, especially for cooks, bakers, and pastry chefs. There are only 3 countries in the world that use the imperial measurement system, and they are the United States of America, Myanmar, and Liberia.
The United States runs the food world of food magazines, cookbooks, blogs, and Internet sites. Even a general Google question will likely bring me the answer for an American, because — goddammit — the internet is also American and therefore dominated by American food culture.
I get the blues when I’m forced to convert a whole page of ingredients from an American cookbook. I then became an unofficial editor, or contributor at best, because indeed, it seems as though the author forgot that people live outside of America and might want to cook their recipe.
Weighing In
The battle between metric and imperial systems has an interesting history.
The Metric system started in France in the 18th century. “Metric” comes from the 18th-century French word mètre derived from the Greek metron or ‘measure’. The system is based on the meter, for length, the gram for weight, or mass, and the liter, for volume.
There are prefixes to make things bigger, like kilo, mega, giga, and so forth, and to make things smaller such as deci, centi, and milli. The metric system is decimal because it is always based on powers of 10 — how convenient. It makes the conversion between units simple, such as one liter of water weighs one kilogram.
The Imperial system is a unit of measurement from the British Imperial System, officially used in Great Britain from 1824 until the adoption of the metric system beginning in 1965. It is based on lengths, such as the inch, foot, yard, and mile. For weight, there is the ounce, pound, stone, and hundredweight, for fluid weight there is the ounce, pint, quart, and gallon. To state that there are 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard, but 1760 yards are in a mile is far from decimal-friendly and for intuition’s sake simply confusing.
What medieval village idiot came up with that? Then there are 16 ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, and 8 stones in a hundredweight. For liquid and dry measures 1 pint is 4 gills, 1 quart is 2 pints, a gallon is 4 quarts and a peck is 2 gallons, and whatever a bushel is well, it’s 4 pecks.
The third measuring system is the U.S. Imperial system, derived from the British Imperial system. Once the U.S. gained their independence they wanted to further themselves, their culture, and even their measurements as far away as they could to the British (insert measurement pun here.) But, the only difference compared to the British system is the volume measurements. The U.S system has a slightly lower quantity when it comes to ounces in pints, quarts, and gallons
A long-stretching history of the attempts to standardize measurements goes way back, from Romans using a foot-based measurement, to Saxon farmers using the furlong, the distance a team of oxen could pull a plow before needing rest.
In the early 800’s, the French King Charlemagne tried to standardize but his realm crumbled before change could take place. In 1215, the Magna Carta introduced measurement standards to be spread out through England, but there was a lack of enforcement.
King David I of Scotland, around 1150 A.D. defined the Scottish inch as the width of an average man’s thumb measured at the bottom of the nail. King Edward II of England, in 1324 A.D. dictated an inch to equal three grains of barley. Then in 1495, King Henry VII of England set standards for quantities such as the bushel, peck, gallon, and quart and stored the visual models in the town of Winchester, and these measurements became the Winchester Standard.
To end a long line of a messy tangle of medieval weights and measurements, along came the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824. It kicked the Winchester Standards out the door and slowly, those Imperial measurements became what the majority of the world scratched our heads at, still today.
In 1789 a study conducted in France found around 800 different measures in use, and a Swiss survey in 1838 found that the inaccurate foot marked 37 different lengths.
We are able to have precise cooking measurements thanks to a widespread social and scientific revolution, namely the French Revolution in 1799 and their open reception to ‘new ideas’.
In 1790, a panel of five French scientists was appointed to put an end to this mess of measurements. A year later, the National Assembly of France introduced a decimal-based degree of measurement. The basic unit of length was — pay attention now— one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, with that line passing Paris.
This was called a ‘meter’ from the Greek word ‘metron’ which means ‘measure.’ This metric measurement for length, weight, and volume corresponded logically and made the conversion between them simple.
In 1798, France invited luminaries of the world to come to France and learn about the new system. Yet, the United States was not invited because there was enmity over a treaty during what was known as the Quasi-War, or Pirate-Wars where French privateers were hounding the American navy in the Caribbean.
John Adams, the American president at the time wanted to see if this decimal-based measurement would stand the test of time since France was in the middle of the French Revolution.
Napoleon revoked the metric system in 1812 and tried to create a hybrid system which luckily never took place, I’m not sure I would be able to handle yet another system. Once Napoleon’s empire broke down the French Assembly imposed the metric system in 1840, surely enough, France welcomed it.
As did 17 nations once the Treaty of the Meter, including the U.S. The system caught on quickly in most places especially countries wanting to reject the imperial colonial rule, and especially the scientific community. By 1971, the U.S National Bureau of Standards recommended that America switch over to the metric within a decade which had American Congress pass the Metric Conversion Act in 1975.
Just as with the Magna Carta in 1215, the transition was encouraged but it wasn’t mandatory and neglect followed to refrain from any change.
Understandably, the inconvenience of changing over to a new system of measurement would require a tremendous scale of adopting new tools, equipment, and retraining of workers. As well as the cultural and historical tradition of the initial system, being part of American heritage and identity is not easy to let go of.
Off to the Scales and Pots
Culinary measurements were a wonky subject before the late 1800’s. The recipes before that era had measurements that grandmothers would love, you know the kind like, “a dash of that,” “a few spoons of this,” and so on.
The majority of the world does not understand the U.S. imperial measurements, so the cookbooks from America only sell to those willing to convert page after page of ingredients to the metric system as if you were a medieval scribe half-starved trying to cook something decent.
Which, honestly, is a horrible game plan for any publishing house printing mass cookbooks and disregarding most of the world, their measurements and potentially their interest. Some cookbooks took the time to note the differences in the recipe where the weight and volumes of ingredients are listed (and to those who dare put only a graph table at the beginning or end of the cookbook, I curse you.) But why bother, if only there were some measure that the majority of the world already uses… Oh right, the metric system!
That way we wouldn't have to worry about the difference between the three measurement systems and dedicate the science of cooking to one. I can see the three musketeers of measurement, where two agree to lay down their arms and declare their colleague the triumphant one who deserves the crown, the musketeer of the metric.
Can we keep things sane for the sake of the future? Like measuring in grams for precision, instead of rounding off a cup of who knows what and trying to scrape tablespoons to scale recipes and convert a cup of sugar into grams because not all sugar weighs the same? This imprecision is mocking our palettes!
Let’s use metric because of its convenient logic, and why does the culinary world have to pay for the inaction from America’s refusal to convert to the metric system?
So after all this, let’s cook up a nice meal according to a metric-measured recipe and whip out the scale.
Go figure, the battery is dead…
Soufflé-ly yours,
The Greasy Pen
P.S.
I found some very fitting memes to express further frustration on both sides of the conversion table:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4959b9fb-a35c-4733-a5c0-74e7ffa6fe3c_460x430.jpeg)
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