Culinary and Mathematics

In my travels, I have learned a lot of different things. One of the hurdles that my students struggle with is mathematics in the kitchen. There are others equally difficult and important that I will confront later.

Kitchen math is relatively simple but it is painfully obvious that there are deficits when training young folks. It's the fractions that trip them up. It's frustrating to them and to me that they are in high school and stumble over this stuff. My 6th - 8th grade group are better at it than my older kids and I believe that the quality of their education is a bit better.

Multiplying and dividing fractions, and dealing with 3 tsp equal 1 Tbsp, the rules of non-metric calculations are able to confuse the best of us. I hit them consistently with kitchen math, both on paper and in practical usage.  I am disappointed that the movement to change to the metric system has been extremely slow. Metric system is much simpler to calculate as the entire system is base 10.

With metric system calculations, a quick glance is typically all you need to do in order to scale a recipe, however, America has been very resistant to a change over. Many of our citizens that use the metric system know how to use it because of our drug culture. Believe it or not, grams and kilos are predominate measurement in drug trafficking but when cooking you have to deal with 1/3, 2/3, 128 oz equal 1 gallon, and 16 oz or 2 cups equal 1 pint.


I have been an advocate for conversion to the metric system since high school chemistry class, a thousand years ago, because of its simplicity. Unfortunately, we have not converted and all of cookbooks use the old system so we cannot get accustom to use of metric. We buy 2 liters of soda pop but not 100 grams of sugar, for example.

Our system is the one we inherited from the British Empire where 1 foot was the measurement based upon the length of the King's foot. Americans do not use the weight measurement of stones but rather pounds. Horses are still measured in hands tall and we do still use peck, bushels, yards, and acres. All are old British royal family measurements. I could understand the use of this system when there wasn't an alternative, but metric is far superior and simplistic, so why not adopt the better system?