this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Tbf as someone who grew up with the imperial system due to being raised by a British boomer its fairly easy if you're familiar with it, I still often cook in imperial due to a load of old cook books I have.
Having said that anyone who wants the imperial system in the modern day is a absolute idiot, metric is objectively superior.
A brit once told me that the imperial system makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of a peasant at the market - units of 12 was a lot easier to work with in the olden days because it's easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
I guess it makes sense from a historical viewpoint.
I just wish it was always 12 instead of 3, 12, 1760 and whatever the eff they come up with.
Farenheit on the other hand does not make sense at all
Best way to use Fahrenheit is to consider it as a percentage of how hot it is. 0 degrees is zero percent hot, and 100 is fully hot. Beyond that you’re in super cold/hot territory.
But yeah, Celsius is still better.
Fahrenheit is better at describing weather in reference to human interaction with temperature Celsius is better for everything else.
But that's the same for everything imperial. It's always better when it comes to actual human elements. How big is that stick? How many things in that piece of bread? How much weight is that rock? I need to move.
While metric is basically better anytime you have tooling you need to be extremely exact. You need to know something that is less human and more mathematical or abstract.
Well each system can do the thing. They're not great at it quickly falls apart. That's a big reason why people tend to say imperial sucks. Most people no longer actually interact with the natural world anymore. Everything is computers, exact measurements, quantifiable numbers from shops. The only thing left that most people deal with on a day-to-day basis is the weather and why Fahrenheit may be better than Celsius. It's only vaguely better since weather is already such an imprecise thing that really doesn't matter.
Well yes the granularity of Fahrenheit is far more useful. If you actually want to be like specific about things Celsius when it comes to weather it's close enough f****** does the job
That "better reference to human interaction" argument just doesn't hold any water though. The claim that using imperial means you are closer to nature is ludicrous and also horrendously US defaultist. Much of continental Europe was fully metric when people were still so much "closer to nature" and barely anything "was computer" yet, except for some room filling mainframes. Yet people here had no issue with all those metric units.
While imperial is absolutely atrocious at engineering and at scientific applications, SI units work perfectly fine for human reference interactions. Are there tiny differences, that give maybe imperial an edge in some circumstances? Possibly? In a way that it actually matters? Hardly.
This is certainly the case for °C vs °F. Anything finer than °C is below the precision of everyday thermometers and also hard to percept. While increments larger than that can be easily measured and are also perceptible. All relevant environmental temperatures are merely 2 digits, with boiling water at 100. That's perfectly adjusted to human interaction and reference. Most people don't need finer "granularity" in everyday life but if they do, they simply include the first position after the comma. This is optional and completely frictionless "ganularity", when you need it.
I am not saying that Fahrenheit is necessarily worse. It is one of the few imperial units that don't suck. But it is also not meaningfully better either, just different.
I mean, you can always use different units in different contexts. We use F for the weather but C for the kettle, personally! (C for the oven would probably also be better, but all the recipes are in F.)
-- Frost
Fahrenheit makes more sense as a unit in use. 100 equals hot, but doesn't equal death, 0 equals cold. In a lot of the world freezing is only kind of cold, not actually cold. Metric makes sense for science while imperial is more of a common persons unit; that's also why Americans in science use metric.
It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)
So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile
... And of course there's the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.
Its basically entirely this, its not for no reason much of the world wound up using something akin to it. Honestly for small scale stuff such as cooking I do genuinely quite like using it but especially in the digital age its simply become obsolete I can't imagine having to code something which requires employing imperial measurements.
Imperial is FAR more human and "natural" then metric. Metric fails frequently at being quantifiable with natural experiences and objects.
But imperial falls apart the second your trying to do something at a large scale, super small scales or literally anything that isn't "human scale"
And basically every test I've ever seen. If you don't have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.
Metric relies far too much on reference in tooling, but that's also its greatest strength. It's absurdly, exact and reliable while imperial is loosey-goosey
That's clearly utter bollocks
The biggest issue with imperial recipes is the constant use of measures by volume. If everything was in weight ounces it would be alright, but a lot of recipes insist on measuring solids by volume, like a cup of flour, a teaspoon of sugar etc, making them a lot harder to replicate consistently. My flour could be denser, my sugar could be finer, if things were measure by the actual mass such things would not matter but instead I have to fill a cup and pray to the gods that my cup of Ecuadorian flour has the same density as the one on the recipe (it almost never is)
Surely using oz & lbs on a scale solves this?
That's the whole point, the recipes aren't in oz and pounds, they're in cups and table/teaspoons
Sounds like a issue with American cook books then ngl, you can also get defined standardised cul &tbsp scoops.