Okay, so this might be only tangentially related to cooking, but I just want to mention something about the metric system.
My job primarily involves doing cooking demonstrations for people who’ve come to Alaska for vacation (it’s a great job), and I meet people from all over the world. Sometimes people read my recipes and ask me what I mean by “2 c.”
“Excuse me, what does ‘2 c.’ mean?”
“That’s two cups.”
“Oh.”
“Where are you from?”
“The U.K.”
“Hey, we got these measurements from you!”
These people are used to reading recipes like this:
400 g canned pink Alaska salmon
300 g courgettes
150 ml Dry white wine
50 g shallots
25 g cornflour
175 g Gruyere
I’ve been reading recipes on the internet for many years, and I’ve become accustomed to finding recipes in English measurements. But this is changing. I’ve noticed that some professional cooking websites are now using metric measurements.
The world internet is becoming more international. For the last 20 years, the US has dominated. It used to be you could assume a website was US-based and US-focused, but that’s changing.
Here’s a map of all the countries that use the metric system. Metric system countries are in green, the other ones are in red. There are only three countries that don’t use the metric system: the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
