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Comment by thebooktocome | Hacker News Reader

Imperial units are unfortunately still in common use in the United States, the United Kingdom, and related colonies/ex-colonies. They are variable base number systems that people reckon with on a daily basis.

It wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking, that England used pounds, shillings, and pence! Decimal currency really was a fantastic innovation.

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Pedantic comment: USA doesn’t use the imperial system, that was Britain. USA has used the “United States Customary Units” since 1832. Since 1893 the units have been defined in terms of metric.

Since 1991 the rule has been to “prefer metric units”, which I guess is why all packaging you commonly see includes measurements in both systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

edit: After living in EU and US, I will grant that the lbs is a more convenient unit for measuring food. A kilo of apples is a lot, but a pound is just right.

I don't think the difference between pounds and kilos really matters to purchasing food, but labeling everything with a per 100g nutrition facts rather than just whatever BS serving size the manufacturer makes up is a significant improvement. You can buy oil in the US that is listed as containing 0 calories and 0 fat per serving (and 1000+ servings per container). Not that that's a unit system issue.

As a calorie counter, I have thoughts on this. Comparing foods at the supermarket based on 100g base units is easier, true. But that means you need a scale every time you eat anything. It’s waaaay easier to go “yeah that’s about 1/3rd of the package” (and accurate enough for me).

So really I’d love nutritional labels that have both.

If everything was based on 100g, people would become used to roughly weighing things with their hands and knowing roughly how many calories are in their food.

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