A measured respsonse

I suffer the same feelings when reading popular science books written by Americans

PETER GOODYEAR

I can understand Matt Mohan-Hickson’s frustration with Americans' steadfast refusal to use the metric system (Why can't the Americans go metric... just like us? March 15).

I am one of the moderators of an internet forum for discussion of the metric system, and I found Mr Mohan-Hickson’s article in my regular sweep of the internet for news mentioning the metric system.

I suffer the same feelings when reading popular science books written by Americans, or articles in American science magazines such as Scientific American, all written using the firkin/furlong/ fortnight/Fahrenheit system of measurements.

This is particularly annoying as I live in Australia which has been thoroughly metric for more than 30 years.

Has Mr Mohan-Hickson done any research into the value of the capacity of a US cup? If he has, he would have done a favour to other cookery enthusiasts by sharing this knowledge with them.

For cooks outside America, here are the appropriate conversions:

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, 1 cup =

240ml when used to measure serving sizes.

According to Google:

1 US cup = 236.5875 millilitres 1 tablespoon = 14.786765ml, which is 1/6 of a cup, round it off to 15ml. 1 teaspoon = 4.9289216ml which is

1/3 of a tablespoon. Round it off to 5ml.

American recipes may also use a ‘stick’ of butter. This is 1/4 of