jsburbidge | Measures: Two More Reasons To Avoid American Products

1) A month or two ago, I was looking for an adequate container for flour. If you buy 5 kg bags of flour and up (best value, but a little excessive unless you bake really quite a lot) your best bet is a plastic garbage pail, but below that level a container that will fit on a shelf is a reasonable hope.

Flour in Canada is sold in 2.5 kg bags.

The containers available, all made in the US, are for five pound bags of flour. Those of us old enough to remember the Imperial System will recall that one kilo is 2.2 pounds, so we get five and a half pounds. The flour containers will not hold the amount of flour one buys.

I was somewhat scathing to the person at the store. One can get containers, not meant for flour as such, which are larger still; but it is rather pointless to offer for sale containers not really fit for their advertised use.

2) On the other hand, they can't get the old system right either. I have a number of older English cookbooks, mainly Penguins, which predate the adoption of metric.

I find it nigh impossible to find proper liquid measures. Ignoring the fact that a proper pint is 20 ounces (and a quart 40 ounces) all I can find is inferior US products which mislabel them as 16 and 32 ounces, respectively.