Americans refuse to use the metric system because they are an arrogant, insular people
with an instinctive distrust of all international customs and institutions. They're also an
ignorant, lazy people who refuse to change their ways, even when their ways are demonstrably
inferior.
At least that's what some people say about us Americans. Is it true? I think kinda, yeah,
a little bit, but it's of course more complicated than that. Differences between people are
the result of their circumstances at least as much as they're the result of anybody's
intrinsic qualities, and I reckon that had any other people been in the unique circumstances
of the industrial-era United States, they probably would have resisted metrification
too.
And yes, from a historical perspective, this does have more to do with industry, than it
has to do with cooking or anything else, though we will get back to cooking.
These are, at least, my personal conclusions after I went to the University of Georgia
to visit Dr. Stephen Mihm, a historian specializing in the subject of standards. He's working
on a book about the metric system as we speak, and he cooks, too. Hey, which system does
he use in the kitchen?
"Well, I would say I'm bilingual in terms of my measurements, in that use cups but I
also have a gram scale, and I toggle back and forth on that pretty readily, depending
on whether I'm using an American cookbook or a European cookbook."
Samesies. Who says all Americans are monolingual? (I'll tell you who says that: People who don't
realize that America now has way more people from way more different places in it, but
I digress.)
So why does Dr. Mihm think America still hasn't gone metric?
"So it's a question that Thomas Jefferson was probably the first to ask back in the
1790s, because it was during the French Revolution that the metric system was invented, and Jefferson
was a big fan of the French and actually seriously contemplated for awhile the idea of nudging
the new nation onto the metric system. But it was very hard to do, because one, it was
a revolutionary thing and it was politically fraught — there were a lot of people who
didn't like the French. And so, they kicked the can, basically, in the 1790s, and they
decided instead to go with the existing set of measurements that had been inherited from
Great Britain."
And indeed, Dr. Mihm says the French were pretty resistant to metric too, at first.
For decades, it looked to U.S. authorities as though metrification was a global failure.
"And then by the time they revisited it again in the 1860s and 1870s, where they begin to
legalize the use of the metric system, something very momentous had happened in the meantime,
which is that the United States had industrialized. The railroads and precision manufacturing
and machine tools all require very precise mechanics that rely on units of measurement,
namely the inch. And the entire industrial base had been tooled up — and quite successfully,
by the 1870s the United States is the biggest economy in the world — it had been tooled
up in this old, antiquated system of measurement. And so when metric advocates suddenly show
up in the 1870s and 80s and start pounding on the table and saying 'We need to go metric,'
the industrialists of the country say 'No, no, we're not gonna do that. That's a stupid
idea,' and they had various rationalizations for it."
Let's start with a debatably good rationale. U.S. customary measurements may be better
than metric for certain industrial applications, like machine shop work.
"For milling out a pipe thread, because it's a binary system where you have an inch as
the core unit, and then the subdivisions are half, quarter, eighth, 16th, 32nd. So for
mechanics working on a shop floor, dividing by half is a very intuitive thing."
In contrast, a base 10 measurement system can make it kinda harder to divide by half.
A centimeter is 10 millimeters. Half of that is 5 millimeters. No problem there. But then
half of that, a quarter is 2.5. Half of that, an 8th, is 1.25, half of that, a 16th, is
.625, and a 32nd is .3125. Ew.
There's a theory as to why measurement systems descended from the Brits, and the Romans before
them, are built around numbers like 12 and 16, rather than 10. 12 and 16 have more factors,
therefore they're more easily divisible, or so this theory goes. A pound of, say, flour
is 16 ounces. If I want to cut my recipe in half, it's 8 ounces. If I want to make a quarter
batch, it's 4 ounces — half of that is 2, and half of that is 1, and quantities of flour
less than an ounce are pretty rare here in the kitchen, so who cares if the numbers are
gonna start to get ugly if we keep dividing?
If the pound were, instead, base 10, like metric, and there were 10 ounces of flour
in a pound, half of a half of a half of a half of a pound would be .625 ounces, which
is an ugly number compared to 1 ounce, which is what it is in the real world.
The metric system deals with this problem by making its core units way smaller. Just
one pound of flour is 454 grams. That's a way bigger number, so it's an easier number
to divide down without getting into some long, ugly decimals, as long as you're cool with
rounding up or down to the nearest gram, which if course you would be, because a fraction
of a gram is gonna make no meaningful difference in any recipe.
That works, but the problem with grams and milliliters is that they're so small compared
to the size of the things that we actually tend to measure in real life. As a result,
the metric system is arguably a little bit less intuitive.
Dr. Mihm says it's a similar deal in an industrial context. An inch, half an inch, and eighth
of an inch...
"...cognitively, that makes more sense for someone scaling things on the increment of,
say, a screw thread."
OK, so in your head, you're probably screaming counter-arguments to everything that you've
heard so far, because this is a pretty thin line of reasoning to resist the metric system.
Indeed, shop rats around the world are milling things out right now using the metric system
and they're doing just fine.
There was a more compelling, though perhaps less noble reason why the United States resisted
metric in the late 19th century, and we will discuss what it is just after I thank the
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And now for the more compelling reason why the United States resisted the metric system
in the late 19th century: It was all about the machinery of the second industrial revolution
— the gears and chains and switches that would go on to save your asses in two world
wars, Brits!
Those machines had already been built to work on one system, and Dr. Mihm says industrialists
simply didn't want to have to rebuild them.
"The key opposition that you see emerging in Congress, and in the halls of technical
journals and the like, comes from engineers."
So now you might be wondering, "I mean, the Brits used British Imperial units, I mean
it's right there in the name. And Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution.
They had huge machines built to run on feet and pounds — machines that they, no doubt,
didn't want to have to rebuild. And the Brits also have an instinctive distrust of the French,
and yet even the Brits went metric, so what's wrong with you Yankees?"
Good question. But let's remember that the Brits did resist metrification for a long
time. Some of them even fell back on this absurd pseudoscience they'd invented about
how the inch is divinely prescribed in nature, which is why you can see it in the designs
of the great pyramids of Egypt, which of course is not actually true. But anyway, Britain
did indeed resist metrification well into the 20th century, and then...
"By the 1950s, 1960s, Britain is de-industrializing. And so, what had once been the key part of
its economy had started to fall away, and it did so earlier than we started to deindustrialize,
and it did so more fully."
In contrast, the United States in the mid 20th century was the undisputed industrial
heavyweight champion of the world. The captains of industry didn't want to rejigger their
assembly lines, and Congress generally did whatever the captains of industry told them
to do.
The Brits also had much closer ties to the metric world, perhaps by virtue of being much
closer to the metric world. Americans were more geographically isolated, and also...
"...exports have historically been less important for the United States, and the domestic market
has been the primary driver of growth — unlike Japan or Germany, where the export markets
are where it's all at."
Indeed, the big reason why the United States resisted metric in the mid-20th century may
simply have been that we could.
"The United States has had the luxury of being the world's largest economy and, as such,
can effectively operate according to its own rules."
It's rather like language. Are so few Americans multilingual because we're just a bunch of
dummies? No. It's because, as a legacy of British and then American global hegemony,
you can get very, very far in this world only speaking English. So, most of us simply don't
have to learn another language. Now you could argue that we Americans become dummies as
a result of that, because we never acquire the kind of cultural competence that you can
get by learning someone else's language. You sure could make that argument. You don't want
to hear my high school Spanish.
And this maybe gets at why post-industrial America continues to resist metric. It's the
privilege of hegemony — it makes you lazy. And then when your hegemony starts to slip,
it makes you resentful and paranoid — turns you into...
"...people who view the metric system as a form of global governance that undercuts American
sovereignty."
And it's among such folks where opposition to metric is primarily concentrated here in
the United States these days. And also, with our tradition of federalism, there's a lot
of ideological opposition to the kind of centralized government regulation that it can take to
move a society off of the standards to which everyone is accustomed.
And yet, without any heavy-handed government action at all, lots of Americans have been
quietly adopting the metric system for decades now. Scientists and medical professionals
almost exclusively use metric on the job anymore.
"When our doctors write a prescription for a painkiller, we don't go, you know, 'Absolutely
not! I insist that you measure this in grains and drams. Pharmaceutical companies, and also
druggists, realized — and they were right — that the metric really did have serious
advantages, because of its precision and its scalability in the powers of 10."
Which are the very same reasons why a lot of people who work in food in the United States
have been adopting metric too, in particular pastry chefs. They love the precision you
can get with smaller units of measurement. Dr. Mihm reckons that U.S. customary measures
will end not with a bang, but with a whimper, as more and more Americans just kinda peel
off to metric on their own. Certainly the main reason that I still use U.S. customary
in my recipes is just that that's how ingredients come to me packaged in my grocery store, but
I wonder how much longer I'll stick with it.
My job these days is to write recipes for you. And while the plurality of you are in
the U.S., the majority of you are somewhere else, and I can already feel your influence
on how I think and communicate in measurements.
In that sense, what you and I are doing on the internet right now is driving the very
globalization that a lot of Americans find threatening — Americans the political right
and left, by the way, though perhaps for different reasons.
I myself tend to think that globalization is, on balance, a really good thing — not
the least because it has allowed us to enjoy each other's food way more, and long may we
continue in that.