For the Love of the Metric System
It’s official. The Boozer Blog is international. Those of you who know me would not be surprised by this announcement. Some long-time friends of mine live oversees. I work for a very international company, and I travel for work and pleasure frequently. I once had a work colleague make the comment, “You’re more European than American”. She was European. I took it as a compliment. Even if that were true, my Americanism runs deep, or should I say my U.S. upbringing. I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush and bring Canada or Mexico into this, or even Brazil. The rest of the Americas are onboard with the common international units of measure. We in the U.S. stubbornly adhere to our ways.
I can’t remember exactly the years, but I do remember a time when the U.S. had planned to change to the metric system from the imperial system. We had speed limit signs that would show both miles per hour and kilometers per hour. We had units of measure discussions in school, not just learning what a kilogram is versus a pound, but how do we convert one to the other. All of this was to prepare us for a world where we discussed kilometers, meters, kilograms and milligrams. It obviously didn’t take.
I don’t know the reason why, but as I write this, there are no longer any speed limit signs that display kilometers per hour, and if you put a gun to my head there is no way I could convert a pound to a kilogram without access to my phone and google. Somewhere along the way, the U.S. decided to leave good enough alone.
All of this is to say, some of the most pointed feedback I’ve gotten on my recipes is the difficulty for people outside the U.S. to convert them to the measurement standards of the rest of the world. I may share some European sensibilities with my friends and colleagues, but when it comes to units of measure, I am imperial not metric. Of course, so are the majority of Boozer Blog readers, and trust me, if I started writing recipes with centiliters and grams my U.S. audience would think I was writing in Klingon.
To bridge these audiences, I pledge to do better with my recipes and provide conversions to metric. I’ve included in this post the most common measurements that appear in my recipes and their metric counterparts. That should at least make my current blog posts more manageable. I’ll look at providing these conversions retroactively in my blog posts, but that could take some time. For my new posts, I’ll be sure to provide both measures.
As always, I appreciate all the feedback, even when it pushes me outside my comfort zone. Maybe I should say I appreciate it especially when it pushes me outside my comfort zone. I said from the beginning that this is our blog, and I mean it. The Boozer Blog is international, it’s time it starts acting like it. Cheers! To health, happiness and a good drink!
