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Yes of course, but if you are used to metric units it's pretty hard to develop a good intuition around pounds, cups, inches and ounces, and I find intuition and

Yes of course, but if you are used to metric units it's pretty hard to develop a good intuition around pounds, cups, inches and ounces, and I find intuition and the ability to clearly visualize proportions pretty important when cooking.

comex 11y ago
Yes, while if you have prior experience with cooking in the US (but are still interested in the science), then you are used to pounds, cups, inches, and ounces, and may find it hard to develop a good intuition around liters and grams. (Also, it will be easier to find things like measuring cups and spoons delimited in the former.) They're just units...
- Jedd 11y ago
  > They're just units... Indeed. Units that correlate (1kg water == 1 litre of water) and are intuitive (100C = boiling water). The fact that the imperial units aren't even common amongst the two remaining countries that use some number of them is just 12oz of icing on the cake. It's frustrating to find an otherwise fine cooking or science book ruined by the prose pandering to some elderly subset of 5% of the population.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    1/20 of the planet's population is not 1/20 of the market's population, particularly when writing in English.
  - comex 11y ago
    I understand the sentiment, but I think you are underestimating the subset of the population that traditional units "pander" to - including, anecdotally, me. I'm 23, far from elderly, and like many of the people on this site, work with computers for a living; I'm not uneducated or anti-intellectual. But I have minimal background in the physical sciences, so never got much exposure to metric units that way, and living in the US, I've never really needed them outside of that. Sure, the metric units are for the most part inherently superior (although I'm a fan of degrees Fahrenheit [1]), while especially for cooking the traditional ones are a mess: e.g. the relationship between tablespoons and teaspoons and the two types of ounces is something which, since I haven't invested that much time in cooking either (I'm working on it), I still haven't memorized. Yet the traditional ones are still what I and many others have been almost exclusively exposed to. Sure, I could go out of my way to buy utensils and look up measurements in metric. On one hand, it would be a bit more forward thinking, especially since I want to try living in Japan at some point and there would be one less change to worry about. On the other, here and now, it would make it harder to talk about recipes with other people. But mostly I just don't care. They're just units. If units "ruin" a book for you then you should reconsider your standards of evaluation. [1] http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-67227.jpg http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-6...
  - lsaferite 11y ago
    > elderly subset of 5% of the population He's writing a book for a US audience. The US audience uses US customary units for measurement and has done so since 'forever' basically. The subset of US citizens that knows metric well enough to be comfortable using it for things like cooking is small enough to be irrelevant for his book. Would it be better to use the metric system for everything in the US? Of course. Will it happen in the next 100 years? Nope. And I'm really confused about the elderly part of your statement. Do you correlate being young in the US with knowing the metric system? If so you are unfortunately wrong. Actually you are more likely to find metric knowledge in the general populous in the older crowed due to an attempt in the 70's to convert to the metric system. So, outside of areas that use metric internally, the older population is more likely to know metric than the younger ones.
  - douche 11y ago
    Worst case, you can spend $10 and get a set of measuring cups and spoons. That's a lot better than the complete clusterfuck that is working on most mechanical equipment - you'll all too often find a bizarre amalgamation of metric & standard hex head, allen, torx and other fasteners, all mixed together - wrenches are nowhere near as inexpensive.
    - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      >That's a lot better than the complete clusterfuck that is working on most mechanical equipment // Wouldn't that largely be fixed by the USA moving to metric.
      - douche 11y ago
        That doesn't magically replace 100 years of legacy parts and equipment.
jghn 11y ago
That's orthogonal to whether or not kenji was being scientific in his methods

comex 11y ago

Yes, while if you have prior experience with cooking in the US (but are still interested in the science), then you are used to pounds, cups, inches, and ounces, and may find it hard to develop a good intuition around liters and grams. (Also, it will be easier to find things like measuring cups and spoons delimited in the former.) They're just units...

Jedd 11y ago
> They're just units... Indeed. Units that correlate (1kg water == 1 litre of water) and are intuitive (100C = boiling water). The fact that the imperial units aren't even common amongst the two remaining countries that use some number of them is just 12oz of icing on the cake. It's frustrating to find an otherwise fine cooking or science book ruined by the prose pandering to some elderly subset of 5% of the population.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  1/20 of the planet's population is not 1/20 of the market's population, particularly when writing in English.
- comex 11y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but I think you are underestimating the subset of the population that traditional units "pander" to - including, anecdotally, me. I'm 23, far from elderly, and like many of the people on this site, work with computers for a living; I'm not uneducated or anti-intellectual. But I have minimal background in the physical sciences, so never got much exposure to metric units that way, and living in the US, I've never really needed them outside of that. Sure, the metric units are for the most part inherently superior (although I'm a fan of degrees Fahrenheit [1]), while especially for cooking the traditional ones are a mess: e.g. the relationship between tablespoons and teaspoons and the two types of ounces is something which, since I haven't invested that much time in cooking either (I'm working on it), I still haven't memorized. Yet the traditional ones are still what I and many others have been almost exclusively exposed to. Sure, I could go out of my way to buy utensils and look up measurements in metric. On one hand, it would be a bit more forward thinking, especially since I want to try living in Japan at some point and there would be one less change to worry about. On the other, here and now, it would make it harder to talk about recipes with other people. But mostly I just don't care. They're just units. If units "ruin" a book for you then you should reconsider your standards of evaluation. [1] http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-67227.jpg http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-6...
- lsaferite 11y ago
  > elderly subset of 5% of the population He's writing a book for a US audience. The US audience uses US customary units for measurement and has done so since 'forever' basically. The subset of US citizens that knows metric well enough to be comfortable using it for things like cooking is small enough to be irrelevant for his book. Would it be better to use the metric system for everything in the US? Of course. Will it happen in the next 100 years? Nope. And I'm really confused about the elderly part of your statement. Do you correlate being young in the US with knowing the metric system? If so you are unfortunately wrong. Actually you are more likely to find metric knowledge in the general populous in the older crowed due to an attempt in the 70's to convert to the metric system. So, outside of areas that use metric internally, the older population is more likely to know metric than the younger ones.
- douche 11y ago
  Worst case, you can spend $10 and get a set of measuring cups and spoons. That's a lot better than the complete clusterfuck that is working on most mechanical equipment - you'll all too often find a bizarre amalgamation of metric & standard hex head, allen, torx and other fasteners, all mixed together - wrenches are nowhere near as inexpensive.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    >That's a lot better than the complete clusterfuck that is working on most mechanical equipment // Wouldn't that largely be fixed by the USA moving to metric.
    - douche 11y ago
      That doesn't magically replace 100 years of legacy parts and equipment.

jghn 11y ago

That's orthogonal to whether or not kenji was being scientific in his methods