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I can't think of any good reason to use volumetric measurement in cooking. Even if you only need approximate measurement, it's still better to use weight because you can put the cooking container directly on the scales and avoid having to wash your measuring cups. And if you do need accuracy, measuring by weight wins every time.

> I can't think of any good reason to use volumetric measurement in cooking

A good reason is because you rarely need exact measurements in cooking (vs. baking), and it's easy to eyeball approximate volumetric measurements, especially with help from the known volume of a container; also because many recipes need quantities of some ingredients (most frequently water) that would require a much larger and more expensive kitchen scale than most people would like to keep.

Small quantities under a tablespoon or 10ml by volume can be quite challenging to weigh, and is much easier to fill up a fixed size tsp/tbsp measure. If your ingredient is a commodity and has a known density ahead of time (water, olive oil, salt, whatever) its mechanically simpler. There are also times when you can't measure into your cooking container directly - maybe it's hot.

I would disagree about weight and distances, having multiple of 10 units make computation easy, it is unfortunate that time is different. Though I agree most people this days would maybe avoid calculating things and use a calculator/software1

Temperature - at what temperature does the water freeze? 0C, 32F. At what temperature does the water boil? 100C, 212F. Which ones are easier to remember on a day-to-day basis?

Weight, Distance - conversion is a lot easier in the metric system

You just mentioned that there were no differences, than why would you use units which have strange relations between each other instead of units that are easy to remember, easy to convert are based on math instead of historical/common knowledge?

How often are you boiling and freezing water when deciding what clothes to wear?

Ok so when measuring water freezing, you have a nice 0. But how do you measure hot weather? 30C? 35C? Meaningless numbers, correct?

I am talking about daily weather. Celsius is no more intuitive than Fahrenheit when discussing it.

Even with cooking, when you are around a certain system, you're just used to it.

I bake a cake at 350F, I fry things at 350-400F. 175C is no more practical than 350F. I need to cook meat to at least 140F-160F to kill the bacteria.

The equivalents in Celsius are no easier to remember from a practical standpoint.

Even body temperature, from my understanding, almost everyone uses 98.5F, correct? (At least in India, where everything was KG and KM, people still used to measure body temperature in F).

Well fridge should not go below 0 Celsius or you have trouble. Teach your children that.

When thinking about boiling water it is easier to think how close to it you are in Celsius, 50% if temp is 50 Celsius.

Personally I'm from Europe but live in US and have trouble with weather forecasts in Fahrenheit. They don't make sense especially when it gets cold.

Even IF Celsius and Fahrenheit were equally good for most purposes, it would be easier if every continent used the same system. Why, because people travel, often from continent to continent.

So if we (the people of Earth) should choose we should most probably choose Celsius, even if it were just slightly better than Fahrenheit.

> Well fridge should not go below 0 Celsius or you have trouble

There are things in the world other than fridges.

> When thinking about boiling water

I only really do this about 1% of the time I need to use temperature.

> Even IF Celsius and Fahrenheit were equally good for most purposes, it would be easier if every continent used the same system. Why, because people travel, often from continent to continent.

This is really the only reason to use Celsius: it works well with other things.

Seriously you don’t see any difference in defining hot weather as 1/3 of the boiling temperature of water? Try to do that in Fahrenheit and you have to do something crazy like (212 - 32) / 3 + 32, and I’m not even 100% sure that is correct... And I guess that for you is much better to remember that at 32 F is very dangerous to drive outside rather than at 0. I really can’t understand how can someone would advocate for maths gimmicks when you have a much easier solution that is even an international standard (or to be precise it’s extremely easy to convert to and from that standard)

"1/3 of the boiling temperature of water" is just as arbitrary as "32".

Generally speaking, you get freeze warnings and black ice warnings when necessary instead of checking to see whether or not the current temp is literally below the freezing point of water. I think OP was just saying that it's good enough for a layperson to use day-to-day.

> Seriously you don’t see any difference in defining hot weather as 1/3 of the boiling temperature of water?

This comparison is utterly meaningless to me, and I say this as someone who prefers to use Celsius.

In Fahrenheit, hot is 100 and cold is 0.

In Celsius, hot is 30 and cold is -10.

When talking about it for what you're wearing and subjective experience, Celsius is a little more awkward and compressed.

Sure, scientifically celsius is more useful, but how often does that overlap with the weather?

No, cold is 0 in Celsius. You risk your life in icy roads at 0.

> Even body temperature, from my understanding, almost everyone uses 98.5F, correct?

98.6 is the approximation most people memorize in Fahrenheit. That number implies more precision than you can reasonably assume in practice, however.

Sure, my point was that the unit of measurement for body temperature in many places that use metric is probably still Fahrenheit, not Celsius. (And that it doesn't really hurt anything, since the boiling and freezing point of water is irrelevant in checking whether a human is ok or not)

At what temperature does the human body rest? ~100F. At what temperature is frostbite a concern to uncovered skin? ~0F. I feel like these benchmarks are more useful in my day to day life than water temps.

Yup, that’s one of my favorite things about the Fahrenheit scale: it’s a good approximation of “on a scale of 1-100, how cold/hot is it outside?” where a broad range of human climates would agree on the answer.

0F is pretty dang cold out, and 100 is pretty dang hot out. Sure, there are temperatures in human habitats outside that range, but most people would consider then “extreme” temperatures, hence values less than zero, or greater than 100.

> 0F is pretty dang cold out, and 100 is pretty dang hot out

That is pretty subjective and no better than Celsius. Anything below 30F is pretty dang cold for me and anything above 85F is too hot

The water freezing/boiling point calibration points seem interesting until you realize that you're never actually at 1 atmosphere (due to elevation and weather) or working with pure water.

You mean at what temperature does water freeze at sea level, right? Pure water, I mean, not normal tap water.

Or, you know, just keep the freezer cold enough to take care of it regardless.

The old British system is good for one thing: tea. Want to brew some tea? 1 teaspoon per cup.

Regarding temperature, Fahrenheit offers more granularity. I, for one, can definitely perceive the difference between 22, 22.5, and 23 degrees C (71.6, 72.5, and 73.4 degrees F, respectively), but on a typical metric thermostat, fractions of a degree aren't allowed.

Until hardware stores in the US start stocking measuring devices longer than a foot with cm and mm markings, I'm going to disagree with the DIY aspect. Yes I can use a tape measure or buy one online. Discussing lumber here is always inches even when precision is necessary, still inches. It's all very frustrating imo.

Yes it is. I bought a tape-measure maybe part of a tool-kit or something and lo and behold it is ONLY in inches. It could easily have cm on the other side but it doesn't.

I guess its cheaper to produce a one-sided measuring tape.

"day-to-day practical measurement" as distinct from what?

Theoretical physicists might be able to skip the units, but the rest of us farmers, engineers, cooks, are doing something practical when we measure.

I'm not really sure what you are arguing.

Look at my arguments. I'm saying exactly what you're saying. Areas that need precise measurements (especially the sciences) are already using metric. I also prefer metric when cooking.

However, think of it this way: In conversational transfer of information, it makes zero difference. If I'm telling you something is 300 miles away, it isn't more useful for me to tell you it's 480 kilometers away. What extra information do you get from that? That it's 480,000 meters away? Humans can't properly visualize probably more than 100 meters. So what practical use when calculating driving distance is knowing that Kilometers vs meters the distance is?

You are making a distinction between daily use and specialist use and then suggesting it doesn't matter, I suppose because everyone has a daily use.

Day-to-day using miles or inches for distance, gallons for volume, and now we have specialists using miles-per-gallon for fuel efficiency, cubic inches for stroke volume ...

> And when cooking, I cringe with "cups" and "tbsp" – I wish it were all grams and ml.

"tsp", that's tablespoons, right? Teaspoons? Argh!

Tsp is teaspoon; tb/tbl/tbsp is tablespoon

tsp (or just t) is teaspoon, Tbsp (or TB, Tbl, or just T) is tablespoon. The little one has a little t, the big one has a big T.