A kilo of strawberries – or would you prefer a pound?

Emily – I sympathise entirely with your point, but for the exact same reason I’d prefer a Pound. I’m only just 40 and was educated entirely in metric all through school from age 5, but until the late 80’s / early 90’s it was still UNcommon to find foodstuffs and medical things expressed in metric in the UK, so I have no concept whatever of what a kilo of strawberries looks or feels like, but I know exactly what a pound is.

For what it’s worth I think we have the whole metric / imperial problem in the UK simply because the government decided NOT to go metric in every aspect of life back in the early 70’s and then in recent years have tried to “finish the job” thus creating the same havoc we had in 1974 all over again.

Dave D

You are right to say that the Government in the 70s didn’t have the courage of its convictions. After recommendations from 1899 onwards that Britain should go metric, Britain decided in 1965 to accept the advice from the CBI to go metric in the interest of British industry. I was born in 1967, and have never been taught anything but metric. I have a great knowledge of imperial, that I have read myself but absolutely refuse to use it. Its rubbish, and certainly not something we need to burden our kids with. Yeah, an inch may be a nice size, but what happens when you want something smaller – try teaching kids today about eights or sixteenths!

As for visualising metric meaurements – well pretty much 1 Litre of any water like liquid is going to weigh a kilo, as is a bag of sugar. simples.

I am confused about your comments regarding metric in medicine not happening til the 1980s. I was on medication throughout the 70s and know that the doseage was 50mg from 1972 to 1980. I also clearly remember all medicine spoons being clearly marked 5ml.

At the end of the day, we were meant to go metric with the rest of the Commonwealth in the 1970s. They achieved it, we didn’t. Our future lies in international co-operation like we see in Airbus, BMW-Mini, Nissan, Honda etc. We need a metric conversant workforce and its a real waste of time to even get them bogged in Imperial twaddle.

But that’s because Tesco are profiteering unmentionables, rather than because either weight measurement is inferior or superior ……….

Absolutely agree PIckle, but my solution is not smaller packs for individuals but to say that we should have the option to buy the weight we want, weighed out at the point of sale, like we always used to in proper shops. This would also have the huge benefit of reducing packaging and waste which would mean that prices could be reduced (or held for longer) as the packaging won’t have to be bought by the suppliers / retailers.

Win all round!

You seem to forget that the ‘older people’ of today, were 36 years younger when we went metric in 1975. They have had 36 years to adapt. There is absolutely no excuse why we need to drag this mess out any longer. A British Government lead the move to go metric in 1975 in the best interest of the country. Dual labelling makes the information difficult to read at a glance, and running two measurements system is a solution only Heath-Robinson would welcome.

And what measure do the French, the inventors if the metric system, use for loose fruit and veg? livres!! (or pounds) which is equivalent to 500g (cf uk lb 454g).

If every elderly people were like you, the metric conversion should be more smooth and less troublesome for it’s already been.

Daniel,
I imagine you did not mean to cause offence but your second paragraph is very offensive.
There are lots of us, including those of us with first class degrees in mathematics who find visualising weights of foodstuffs in metric impossible simply because the British system of using imperial for food and medical matters until at least 20 years after it was ditched for all else has left us used to the old system.

David D

How can it be ‘impossible’ to visualise weights of foodstuff in metric? Are you saying that food is ‘naturally’ Imperial? What tosh! I as most prepacked food is packed in round metric packs, its easy to visualise.

I think what Daniel means is that it is not smart not to go metric. within 50 miles of my house, major employers are Honda, Airbus, BMW and Siemens. All metric companies, all investing in our country and our workforce + BMW has just announced an investment of £500 million If we were still teaching kids Imperial I doubt that would be the case.

Dear oh Dear – I am in trouble – being called by my Sunday name! LOL!

Seriously, I think that the reason Daniel and Michduncg et al can’t understand what I mean about visualising foodstuffs in metric is probably revealed in the phrase “..most pre packed foodstuffs…”. I’m talking about baking and cooking with raw ingredients from scratch. For example, if you have a tablespoon then by definition it holds an ounce of dry goods such as flour or sugar. Therefore, unless there is a proposal to ditch all existing tablespoons and replace them with new Metric ones, simple day to day measurements for cooking, not to mention billions of recipes, will be useless.

I have no objection at all to a dual system, and I would note that some other posters have pointed out that many local butchers and so on still weight out in metric or imperial as the customer asks. This is surely the best option.

When I first posted on here a few weeks ago I must confess that I never even considered one important point: why is there all this fuss about Asda when Waitrose, M&S and Somerfield (now the co-op) have, for as long as I have shopped (i.e. since the early 1980’s) had dual weights on all pre-packed items and weighed deli items in imperial if asked to ? Why it did not dawn on me that Asda are not actually doing anything new at all I do not know.

It also occurs to me as I type that the majority of pre-packed raw goods are actually sold in imperial anyway: why do you think Jam comes in 454g jars? Because 454g is 1Lb and the glass factories and jam factories were not about to change all their machines to take 500g and 1kg jars when we went metric. Likewise sugar, flour, etc is 454g and 908g bags and milk in 0.568 litre (i.e. 1 pint) bottles.

The more I think about it the more I realise that this is clearly some marketing ploy by Asda .

Dave

I too cook from scratch, and if you tell me you still have sugar and flour in your house measured in lbs then I would advise you to check the sell buy dates! I work in food retail and can assure you that these products have been sold in kg’s and g’s for about 20 years. I will take your word for it that a tablespoon is capable of measuring 1oz in dry goods. Tablespoons are very useful as they are defined as they are 15ml, with teaspoons 5ml.

As far as your comments about most items still being sold in 454g or multiples/divisions thereof, I wonder if this varies from retailer to retailer. Certainly most of the products I buy in my weekly shop at Waitrose are in rounded metric measures – pasta, meat, cereal, oils, vinegar, tinned goods, salad ingredients (tomatoes in 500g punnets), meat, bacon (sausages are in 454g in the old style packs, or 400g in new packs of 6), cheese, butter, cider, wine etc. The issue with jam and preserves is that they belong to a group products which can only be sold in particular sizes – bread also belongs to this category. Your comments about jars etc remaining in imperial sizes are dubious given that a lot of UK food in jars is made for a wider market. We could in fact be paying over the odds on some products by forcing food suppliers to run two production lines, one for UK Imperial sizes and another for the rest of the world (except the US)

I simply do not agree that it is in the national interest to run a dual measurement system. No other country does it, our kids are having enough problems with numeracy without us forcing this ridiculous situation on them. And it works the other way. I meet a lot of people in my line of work who request measurements of a product in Imperial eg 150 cm. When I convert that to 5 ft, they will usually ask what that is in inches! Furthermore, running two measurement systems is bad news for consumers – it makes it diificult to compare prices, and price tags are cluttered and ambiguous. We recently rejected a ridiculously complicated voting system that was only used in 3 countries in the world. The same is true of the Imperial system, so lets reject that as well.

So did the EU ‘force’ Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, India and just about every other country in the entire world to go metric as well? In the same way of course, it never forced us to go metric. That decision was taken by an elected UK Government in the interest of British industry.

And a good thing it id too. Look at how much of our manufacturing is under the control of foreign owned and metrically orientated organisations – Airbus, BMW, Nissan, Ford, Siemens etc – all investing billions of pounds in the UK and all 100% metric businesses. Who require UK work forces that are all trained in metric.

You may also be interested to know that all of HM Armed Forces are metric for procurement purposes, including the sizes of the uniforms!

Chris – sorry but I have to disagree with yoru first point: “no one under 65 was taught anything other than metric…..”

Under Thatcher’s education reforms of the late 1980’s the National Curriculum was brought in.

Under the National Curriculum it is a legal requirement that all school pupils are taught imperial and metric and their conversions in Key Stage 3 and 4 mathematics.

This is stil the case.

I am a teacher of mathematics with 17 years of experience. Frankly I would be pleased NOT to have to teach this as the students find it hard and boring, but by law it has to be taught and exam boards examine it as part of the GCSE.

Additionally when I was at school between 1974 and 1986 I was taught imperial and metric,but in those days it appeared to be down to each school to choose which they used. I will say one good thing for the National Curriculum and it’s mandatory content on this topic: at least since 1988 all students have learned BOTH and no one has been left knowing only one or the other and being unable to recognise the one they were not taught.

Your second point about timer merchants made me raise an eyebrow but I am not in a position to make any remark other than that the national timber merchant based in the city where I live sells things in feet and inches, and their metric equivalents (e.g. a 6 foot length of timer is labelled as 182 cm, which is the direct equivalent to 6 feet) , but I don’t really know much about the timber trade and I have no idea how “out of step” they may or may not be. I do, however, know that plumbers merchants sell drainpipes, copper tube and guttering in mm but that if you look at the sizes on sale they are exact metric equivalents of 4 foot, 6 foot and 8 foot lengths.

This is clearly a complex area – much more complex than I or most other posters on here seem to have realised before Asda hit the headlines.

Michduncg.
No, I’m not saying that ALL maths is taught in BOTH systems, what I am saying is that within the National Curriculum for maths ONE of the compulsory topics that has to be taught is the system of metric measures (predominately linear measure, mass and volume and the parallel system of Imperial measures.
I’m not sure of the original reasoning for this when the NC was drawn up but at the present time the reasoning is that the majority of people (according to the ONS) would be utterly lost of asked to track their weight or height in metric and because “Commonly used units such as Lbs, PInts, Feet and Inches are part of everyday life” (I’m quoting the LEA maths advisor for the area in which I work and she i turn is paraphrasing the NC documentation).

By odd co-incidence I was sitting on the bus home tonight and overheard a conversation between a young man of about 19 and his friend who were discussing the baggage weight limits for travel as they planned a snowboarding trip. One of them asked the other what he was taking and the other listed the items. THe first then said “will that be less than the 30kilos limit?” and the second replied “Year, 30 kilos is way massive its like 60 bags of sugar” – which is a fair approximation as sugar still comes in 454g bags – 1Lb or almost half a kilo). THe first replied “Are you sure, I thought 30 kilos was only about 15 bags of sugar” – which would mean they would be 2 kilo or 4 Lb (approx) bags – not a size I see most people buying in the shops. They debated this for a while before solving the matter by looking up Tesco shopping on their mobile phones and soon discovering that 30 kilos really is like 60 bags of sugar because Tesco on line (presumably) shows 1Lb bags of sugar with the metric equivalence shown.
To me this seems to illustrate the need for us to understand both systems, whichever we believe is most widely used.
Just to add to the mayhem, of course, we need to remember that we are not the only country that uses imperial: the good old US of A retains imperial, but just to make life really fun US imperial is not the same as UK imperial. I can’t seethe US changing any time soon just because quite a few other countries are Metric?!

Another though comes to mind: when did you last see any clothes on sale in metric sizes? If you ask a bloke what size waist and chest he is he’ll probably tell you something like 32″ waist and 46″ chest. If you ask him for metric he’ll as like as not not have the slightest clue. I believe that ladies dress sizes are also based on inches.

I also note that gas is still measured in cubic feet by gas meters (1 cubic foot being 1 unit) and then the gas companies and the customers have to perform elaborate calculations to change this to cubic meters and then to KwH just to lease the bureaucrats. At each stage the calculation the re is a value which usually has many decimal places and it is always rounded UP, which means the gas company gets to charge for more than we’ve actually used and we lose out. If we’d kept imperial for billing for gas we would all save a little money each year.
Finally your comment on engineering using metric – I have no experience in this field at all other than to note that, rather like timber and plumbing to which I referred yesterday, most engineering materials seem to be sold in curious metric quantities which, when you look at the conversion, just happen to be the exact equivalents of imperial measures such as Lbs, feet, inches or cubic feet. I’ll hazard a guess that this, like jam jars, is because it would cost too much to replace all the massive machinery with metric versions? I don’t know – just guessing.

To me the bottom line is, as is the case in so many other aspects of life, we actually need to keep several systems in place at once and use each where they work best, rather than trying to force a “one size fits all” solution onto systems where actually that size doesn’t fit at all

Ref the comment ‘The assertion that imperial is defined by metric is flabbergastingly incorrect’ – sorry, but in 1959, the US and the UK Governments officially redefined imperial measurements based on the metric system. So from that date, Imperial has officially been a subset of metric.

[We have edited in the correct quotation of Dave D’s words. Thanks, mods.]

Recently I pointed out some spelling and typing errors in a post on another conversation (Royal Mail) and was promptly shouted at by Patrick Steen of Which? for being offensive.

michduncg has above mis-quoted Dave D in a way which is highly disrespectful and utterly changes the meaning of what he is quoting. I don’t understand why Patrick hasn’t shouted yet?

It was a genuine mistake that I inserted the word ‘stupid’ in place of ‘incorrect’ and if this system allowed me to delete or amend the comment I would.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that I was right in my assertion that Imperial measurements were redefined by the UK & US Governments in 1959, so that they are based on metric measurements.

As a 3rd grader in NY State in 1975 we learned metric along with US Customary, and as an Engineer with a Masters degree I can tell you all engineering courses & textbooks in the US are taught in metric. However in the real world including most of industry (and by the way I worked for Nissan mfg in Tennessee for some time) most measurements and calculations are conducted in US Customary despite the cars being made from parts made using metric measurements. Most of the equipment we built in-house was made using US materials sold in US measurements through US vendors and everything Nissan installed was remeasured into US Customary anyway so it could be modified. If externally-sourced tools, fasteners, toolholders, equipment parts, etc are in metric then they are simply ordered in metric and that measurement is retained. Our biggest problem was the Japanese using Japanese anthropometric data when the plant was built so light switches were placed near waist level, desks were 22″ high instead of the “normal” 28-30″, and overhead conveyors were being bumped into constantly (< 80"). Most auto part attributes which require plant workers to judge weight, length, distance, or insertion force are converted into US Customary for clarity, except discrete parts like bolts & nuts which only have to be selected and placed. I, like many engineers, have most of the conversions memorized anyway so this is not a big deal. Or we just take out the tape measure or scale and remeasure it for ourselves.
Any engineer who designs in this country uses both systems; having a preference to one system or the other is secondary since despite your ego and "principles" you have to deal with what you are handed. I personally prefer inches and feet since they easier to design with. For most manufacturing environments, outside of NASA or precision instruments, building something down to the millimeter is impractical for most tools outside of a machine shop, the closest 1/8" (0.125") or 1/4" (0.250") is close enough for manufacturing purposes.
BTW, the only things metric in Canada are their road signs & temps. I visited Toronto for business and not one thing in the auto parts mfg plant was in metric, including weights. Even in the IKEA store there, furniture dimensions were advertised in metric on the signage but most people were using the paper inch scales to measure the furniture. And for the record, I found the metric road signs confusing despite my ability to convert in my head. When you have exactly 3 seconds or less to see, read, comprehend, and act upon a road sign, trying to convert that while driving at high speeds distracts the driver long enough to create a hazardous traffic condition, in my opinion.

Just to reinforce michduncg’s comments on the 1959 agreement, it was actually a six-party agreement. The other parties were the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. All were using slightly different relationships between the foot and meter(metre) and between the pound and kilogram.

All agreed 1 ft = 0.3048 m and 1 lb = 0.453 592 37 kg and to rely on these declarations and their metric physical standards, rather than Imperial/Customary physical standards. Prior to this the US and UK foot differed by around 3.7 ppm, and we compromised on a value proposed by Canada. The new values are commonly referred to as the International foot and pound, but they are only a six-party agreement. For the US, they were adopted 1959-07-01 by publication in the Federal Register by the Department of Commerce, a rule-making Federal agency. I believe the formal adoption in the UK was a little later, but I am unsure of the details.

The US first used this approach in 1893 (Mendenhall order) but with a slightly different value for the foot, 1200/3937 m. This value has been retained for some land survey work and is known as the Survey foot; it may not be used for other purposes.

This is not a slight to you, but to your teachers. You were not taught very well. Students must be taught to use units of measure (actually measure things), not just do mathematical manipulation.

You are about 178 cm (I’m 194 cm, and born well before you, 1944). One tip: although most people are comfortable using centimeters, perhaps it would be easier to avoid the prefixes centi-, deci-, deka-, and hecto-. By using only prefixes which are multiples or submultiples of 1000, a prefix error is so large as to usually be quite obvious. Is 1.78 m any easier to visualize?

We have the same problem in the US. Students are NOT taught to actually use metric. They are taught to answer stupid questions like “how many nanometers in a kilometer.” While the answer is 10^12, the question does not often come up in the real world, so it is not a very useful skill.

You still have miles, miles per gallon, and pints of beer (though be sure to ask for a top up if you are served 500ml).

I cannot imagine many would want to go back to pounds, shillings and pence. If you are old enough to be familiar with the old system, what is wrong with being bilingual as far as measurements go? Give him an inch and he will take 25.4mm.

In Spain we still use pre-metric expressions which have survived metrication so the French person´s comments about the English losing their traditions have no foundation. Why should 98% of the world have to adapt to 2 countries whose units do differ? It is simply embarrassing, frustrating and incomprehensible that Britain uses ºC, litres, metres for cloth, wood, doors etc… kilos for weight and tonnes for heavier things such as vehicles yet yards and miles for distance. How long can this mish-mash continue. Some government will eventually see the light and consign the outdated imperial units which nobody since the 1960s has been educated in, to the dustbin.