Hyperfixed - Eva Needs to Measure

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Sign up for bonus episodes and extra content at: https://hyperfixedpod.com/joinThis week: Eva lives in the UK, loves to bake, and frequently tries to bake American recipes. But Americans measure by volume and everyone else measures by weight — and converting those measurements is complicated, for complicated reasons.Do you have problems you'd like Alex and the gang to solve? Get in touch with us at http://hyperfixedpod.com by clicking the "Submit a Problem" button.Links: The National Institute of Standards and MeasuresLe Grand KBeyond Measure by James Vincent

Hey everyone, this is Alex Goldman, host of Hyperfixed. If you know my previous show, Reply All, welcome back. I am very excited to be making stuff again. And if you don't, I'm happy to have you. So these two episodes that are coming out right now, they are pilots. After these come out, we're going to spend a couple months with our heads down, and then the show is going to go into full production in November, with a new episode every other week, and bonus stuff on the off weeks. All right, I think that's it. I just wanted to say thanks again for listening.

All right, hope you enjoy. Oh, also, if you have any problems that you want us to try and solve for you, please submit them at our website, hyperfixedpod.com. There's a little button right on the front page. Okay, enjoy the show. Hi, my name is Alex Goldman. This is Hyperfix. On this show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try to. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, Ava needs to measure. Oh, also, is it Eva or Ava?

Eva. This week, Eva needs to measure. Could you do me a favor and start by introducing yourself? Yes, I'm Eva Higginbotham. I have a PhD in neuroscience and I am a podcast producer. What kind of podcast do you produce? So I started off making sort of science radio shows for the BBC and now I work for a production company based in London and I work across basically whatever they give me. So the most fun one I made was a long series about the brain. You know, the neuroscience of falling in love or becoming a parent or how we move, all sorts of things. And then I work on other stuff that's like much more boring.

You can't tell this from her accent, but Eva's actually an American citizen. She moved to the UK when she was two years old, but she still has family in the US and visits them pretty frequently. And her problem is directly related to some of the unique quirks of the cultural exchange between the UK and the US. You see, Eva loves to bake. And specifically, she loves to bake American recipes. I've been baking American recipes since I first started baking, right? From when I was like 11 and got into it. I was using my mom's cookbooks. And the problem is that obviously in America, things are measured in cups and that's a volume. In England, we measure things in grams.

And the problem starts when you're trying to make an American recipe in England and you need to look up. OK, so this recipe says it's a cup of butter. How much does a cup of butter weigh? And then you look that up and you find out that according to different websites, there are about five different answers. Okay, so this is crackers. I mean, what Eve is saying is that when she Googles the question, how many grams are in a cup of butter, she gets back like five answers. Go ahead and try this right now. And you'll see that these answers can have a swing of like 25 grams, which is a lot of grams.

It's like close to an ounce. Obviously, this is the thing we need to get into. But before I could get to that, I had another pressing question. Hold on, hold on, hold on. You measure stuff in grams? So like you measure it as weight instead of volume? Yeah, we measure things as weight instead of volume. Yeah. Sorry, I'm a dummy. I just had no idea. Especially things like butter that's very hard to fill up a cup with unless you melt it, which is, you know,

when I was a kid, I used to, my mom taught me to take like, you take like a measuring jug, you fill it with water to a certain amount and then you put- A measuring jug? Do you not have measuring cups where you come from? How do you measure butter?

A solid butter. How do you put it in a cup? Okay, to measure butter, every stick of butter has little measurements, like a yardstick. It has tablespoons on it. And the tablespoon to cup thing is not that difficult. Here, our butter does not have these tablespoons on it. And the tablespoon to cup thing is not that difficult. So here, our butter does not have these things on it. In spite of having seen enough Great British Baking Show to know better, I truly had no idea that things like flour and butter were measured differently outside of the

U.S. It turns out that the U.S. is one of only three countries who measure based on volume. Eva, and pretty much everyone else in the world, uses an electric kitchen scale. It's small. I put it on the counter. I put a bowl on top of it, and then I zero it. So it's at zero. Because you have to account for the weight of the bowl. Okay. Exactly. And then I cut the butter, and I put it in in the bowl and I see how much it weighs and I add more or take some away if I need to. And then I know exactly, I know that I've got exactly the right amount. That's how I do it. As my kids will tell you, I am much better at making a mess than I am at making food.

But I have successfully executed chocolate chip pancakes on more than one occasion. And even though I am not measuring precisely and I am mostly eyeballing it, they always seem to turn out fine. But fine isn't good enough for Eva. She's a scientist. And for her, precision matters, both in measurement and in execution. Especially if you're like putting the time and effort to like make something delicious. Maybe it's someone's birthday, you know? And what if using the wrong reference for the butter conversion is going to ruin the cake? You know, so I find that hard to take. Which brings us back to Eva's problem. She wants a number, an exact, reliable, definitive, precise, consistent number for how many grams are in a cup.

And beyond that, she wants to know why nobody online can agree what that number is. Who's in charge? You know, where's the overseeing body who's decided? You know what I mean? Like, a gram is a gram. Someone should have decided how much a cup of butter weighs. So I feel like maybe the problem is no one's, like, there's no oversight over how much something is because they started, everyone started off with like, well, my cup is X and your cup is Y and it's fine. Someone somewhere must be able to square these, this circle.

Like we're too advanced as a society to not be able to solve this problem. I agree. I've even ended up on, like, chemistry websites where people are trying to, you know, where it's supposedly more official than other places. You know what's funny is I have never bothered explaining this to anyone before in my life. So, you know, it's not, it's like a very personal problem that I have not shared before. I have to confess that one of the primary reasons I started chasing Eva's problem in the first place was that I was pretty sure I already knew why there was such a large variance in the reported number of grams per cup. And the reason for that variance

was this thing called the grand K or le grand Q. I think I did okay pronouncing that. So when you go to the grocery store, use a scale to weigh your things. And this scale has to be calibrated. To calibrate the scale, we use masses, but this mass has to be traceable to something. And this something was Le Grand Qu'a. This is Doreen El Haddad. She's a physicist who works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is the closest thing the U.S. has to like an overseeing body for measurement standards. And this thing she's talking about, le grand queue, I feel like I'm doing a terrible caricature of a Frenchman every time I try and say it. But this thing she's talking about is literally just a hunk of metal. It's cylindrical. It's about the size of a hockey puck. And it was created in

England in the late 1800s. And the whole purpose of this thing's existence was to solve problems not unlike the one Eva is facing today. You see, back in the 1700s, European colonialism was fueling this massive international network of trade. But at the time, everyone had different systems of measurement. And it wasn't just different from country to country. In France, every village had their own thing. And it was like the length of the arm of the king. And this king changed and it's like a new measurements, right? A new bar that you have to create. So they wanted to standardize things. To simplify trading, they wanted to create a

system that could be used by everyone, not based on the appendages of whatever king happened to be in power at the moment, but on standards that would be immutable and eternal, things that would be true for everyone, everywhere, for all of time. And the system they came up with, you may have heard of it, it's called the metric system. It took nearly 100 years, but in 1875, 17 countries, including the U.S., came to France to sign the Treaty of the Meter, which established the very first universal system of units for time, distance, and weight. And all of these units were calculated on some planetary constant. The meter, for example, is supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator

along the Paris Meridian. The problem is that no normal person knows what that means. You can't eyeball that. So to simplify things, they created physical versions of all of these units, including this metal hockey puck I mentioned, which they called the International Prototype of the Kilogram, called the International Prototype of the Kilogram, or Le Grand Que. That was a definition of the unit of mass. It's one kilogram. It has zero error. And everyone in the world has to follow this mass.

And if this mass changes, everyone in the world will have to adjust to that change. Years ago, when I first heard about Le Grand Que, this last piece about how everyone in the world has to recalibrate their measurements to align with this hockey puck, that was the part that stuck with me. And that's not just like a hypothetical. Apparently, every 40 years, all the countries who signed this treaty travel to France with their own replica hockey pucks

and measure against the original to verify that they're still perfectly calibrated. And sometimes they aren't. They experience something that the scientists call mass drift. And that can happen for a number of reasons. You know, these are physical objects, so they can experience wear and tear. And the fact that they're stored in air means that they could potentially gain mass if there was anything in the atmosphere that could potentially contaminate their surfaces. And if that happens, then the whole country has to recalibrate their scales.

And so when I read Eva's problem, I was like, okay, surely Le Grand Que is to blame. Like the gram isn't a constant thing. Eva said a gram is a gram, but she was wrong because unlike the good old American cup, the gram as we know it actually changes over time. And so I posed this theory to Doreen, and she very quickly was like, yeah, that is definitely not what's happening. We're talking about tens of micrograms, so bakers won't see that. It's like no one sees that. Those are really, really tiny changes that affect people in physics doing measurement, fundamental research. So yeah, no one in the world would notice anything.

Okay, so these infinitesimal changes to Lagrange-Coe would not only fail to register on a home scale. According to Doreen, Lagrange-Coe isn't even the standard of measurement for the kilogram anymore. In 2018, all these memorizations got together and voted it out because it wasn't precise enough. Doreen was part of the team that designed the experiment that now defines the kilogram, which is very cool, but it involves quantum physics and a lot of complex math, and it doesn't help me solve Eva's problem, so I'm not going to try and explain it here.

Maybe in a bonus episode. not going to try and explain it here. Maybe in a bonus episode. Before I said goodbye to Doreen, I asked her what she thought might be causing such a large discrepancy in the online conversion of cups to grams. One possibility could be like the scales are not calibrated. If somebody has a kitchen scale, like measured it, if the scale is not calibrated, the mass will be off. You know, somebody else has a different scale, it'd be off because those scales are not good, you know. Doreen said that poorly calibrated home scales might be part of the problem. But even that wouldn't account for why Ivo has seen such a wide variance in measurements. And when I got off the call with Doreen, I felt completely deflated. I was back at square one. So I turned my attention to preparing

Eva's consolation prize. To mitigate my losses on this overly ambitious show that pretty much every network said would be way too expensive to do on a bi-weekly basis, I started asking the people who write in, if I can't solve your problem, is there something that would make you satisfied enough? And when I was originally speaking to Eva, I asked her if for some reason I'm not able to nail down the universal conversion for cups to grams. Is there one American recipe that you would like me to convert for you? And she said, why, yes, there is. I would love to find a really good, like, peanut butter cookie recipe, because it's not really a thing here.

Lucky for us, we have an ace in the hole. You see, Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland grew up in LA, and apparently if you grow up there, you just know famous people. Like, they're at every barbecue and on every street corner, and you just collect them like Pokemon. After the break, our mystery celebrity guest tells me that I have a lot to learn. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, I mentioned that producer Emma Cortland grew up in L.A. and as a result, knows some famous people. And one of those people is award-winning chef Nancy Silverton.

I didn't know you were going to be on, Emma. So I'm going to mute myself and I'm going to go invisible, but I will be here and I will chime in at the end. But I'm so excited that you're doing this. And I think it's going to be really fun. This is a this is a crazy thing that we're talking about. I mean, maybe not crazy to you, but it was crazy to us. Nancy is the real deal. She's won a ton of awards. She's written tons of cookbooks. She owns nearly a dozen restaurants.

And she once made a brioche tart that was so delicious, it made Julia Child cry. I'm not joking. But the reason we reached out to her specifically is because just last year, Nancy released a cookbook called The Cookie That Changed My Life. And the cookie that changed Nancy's life? The very cookie that Eva asked for as a consolation prize. A peanut butter cookie is a classic, what they call a rolled cookie. The look of that cookie has only one look. And when it comes out of the oven, it needs to flatten and spread. It needs to have round edges.

And it needs to crack on top. If it was dry and it didn't spread at all, that's a problem. Like Eva, Nancy is a perfectionist. And her peanut butter cookie has been called the pinnacle of the form. So initially, our plan was just to ask Nancy to convert the recipe for her life-changing peanut butter cookie from cups to grams. But when we actually looked at her book, we noticed that she already included the conversions. Almost all of Nancy's books about baking include measurements for both weight and volume, and she has a lot of thoughts on why this is important. So we started talking to her about this. We're telling her about

Eva's problem, and how Doreen says scales might not be accurate and how at this point, I was starting to think that simply buying Eva a set of American measuring cups might be the easiest solution to her problem. And in the middle of our conversation, Nancy says, By the way, a lot of them in the volume are not accurate at all.

I sort of thought that volume would be more accurate because a cup remains a cup. Oh, you've got a lot to learn. Apparently. So let me first tell you that when you go to buy a measuring cup at a store, you can buy round ones, you can buy oval ones, you can buy heart-shaped ones, you can buy oval ones, you can buy heart-shaped ones,

you can buy, you know, and every time they change the configuration, they are also compromising its accuracy, okay? So, I mean, you could take six cups and try to get the same amount of flour, and that's going to be a huge variance. Okay. Remember, Doreen told me that one of the reasons Eva was seeing so many different conversions from cups to grams online had something to do with the fact that at-home scales aren't always well calibrated. But she also said that poor calibration still wouldn't account for the large variances that Eva was seeing. And now, Nancy's telling me that large variance could easily be caused by the fact that American measuring cups don't even necessarily measure a cup. I mean, there's no governing body inspecting measuring cups or at-home scales to confirm

that they measure the things they're supposed to measure. So variability is being introduced on both sides of the cups-to-grams equation. And now that I know that, the only thing that's surprising to me is that Eva isn't seeing even wider variability in the conversions. So, I feel like we're making progress. We've figured out why there's so much variability in conversions from cups to grams in recipes that Eva sees online. And we're still working on trying to find one true cups to grams conversion for Eva. But the longer I worked on this story, the longer I sat with these things we'd learned

about measurement, the more I began to feel this other question growing inside me. And that question is, why is all of this necessary? I mean, the U.S. signed this treaty in 1875, establishing the kilogram as the universal measurement for mass. And everyone I spoke to agreed that weighing ingredients was the only way to get anything that was even remotely accurate. So why in the world are we still measuring butter in cups? Why aren't we using the same standards as everyone else?

So I think the reason that U.S. baking is more volume-focused is simply a result of it still being on the customary measures system, the imperial system, rather than having gone metric. Now, the question of why America never went metric, that's another one altogether and quite a large question. I mean, that was going to be my next question. This is James Vincent. James is a journalist based in the UK. And the reason that I'm talking to him is because James wrote a book called Beyond Measure about the history of measurement.

And if I could just editorialize for a second, this book is incredible. I truly did not believe that a book about measurement could hold my attention. But it's so good. It's philosophical, but it's still accessible. And it takes this thing that we totally take for granted, and makes us reconsider it and its place in our lives. James and I talked for an hour about measurement. And I could have gone another couple hours easy. But, you know, I have problems to solve.

Yeah. Why didn't the U.S. go metric? Because as an American in an increasingly international world, it feels ridiculous to me. And the UK itself is not completely metric. You know, we still sell pints of milk. We still sell pints of beer. We still measure weight in stones. We still do height in feet and inches. The UK is also hybridized, kind of similar to how the US is. And a lot of it is cultural. And some things, you know, like a pint of beer at the pub, I can't imagine that will ever disappear because that is such a cherished symbol.

Measurement is a cultural practice. It says something about identity. So what was it about the American identity that made us cling to the U.S. customary system while the rest of the world was adopting the metric system. There's a few different reasons for this, and I guess they can be summed up with basically convenience. Yep, that's right. According to James, it was just never convenient for the U.S. to adopt the world's system of measurement. When America was founded, it was around the same time as, you know, the metric system was being created, was being finalized or had been finalized.

And there was a lot of enthusiasm among the founding fathers for the metric system. You know, they really loved it. They thought this is great. We'll definitely adopt it at some point. And then ultimately, they had more important things to get on with. But there's another reason that the U. the US didn't adopt the metric system that will probably seem far more familiar. The US originally rejected the metric system and has again, several times over the past 150 years or so, because we're really nationalistic. originalistic. Remember when I said that the meter was defined as one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator in a meridian line that runs through Paris? Well, Thomas Jefferson really didn't like that. That means it's always going to be French in its

constitution. There's going to be something unavoidably French about the metric system. And so that was one of the reasons he didn't like it. It's going to be, it's going to have a subtle French tinge to it that I can't explain, but the vibes are just off. There were some other reasons the U.S. never went metric, including the fact that the U.S. has such a massive internal economy that they could kind of just throw their weight around and make everybody do what they wanted anyway. But Thomas Jefferson's silly prejudice about the vibes of the metric system being too French, it never really went away. You know, when I was doing my research for the book, I ended up, you know, kind of skirting over old right-wing talking points. And I found a segment that Tucker Carlson did, which you should absolutely absolutely look up where he's interviewing a guy

named james panera i think it is and it's about the uh the devilish metric system and it's insane to me because he's talking about the metric system he he calls it you know this atheistic this godless creation this you know it was born out of the blood and the turmoil of the french revolution and we never should adopt it because it's unnatural and it's invented by these weird commies. Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant, creepy system that we alone have resisted. How long can we hold out against it, would you say? And there is still this huge cultural divide over metric versus imperial,

which is, I think it's incredible, but it's also very understandable. It's tied to a sense of sovereignty and to cultural identity. You know, it's something that I think is very strong in America, still strong in the UK as well. And it's basically saying we want to create our own measurements. We want to decide how the world is measured around us and why would you take this away from us?

It's like taking away language. This is an idea that James brought up a couple times during our interview, that measurement is somewhere between the universality of mathematics and science and the cultural import of language. And what I'm finding out about measurement

is that like language, anytime something's translated, it's done with the opinions port of language. And what I'm finding out about measurement is that like language, anytime something's translated, it's done with the opinions and biases of the translator behind it. There is no perfect conversion from cups to grams, both because of the inexactitudes built into our system and because conversions are at least part interpretation. And so with all that we learned, we went back to Eva to share our findings. But first, I had to apologize. Alright, the first thing I want to do is apologize for giving you shit about using a scale instead of using volume.

Because I have consulted with the experts, and they say that you are right, that weight is a vastly superior system for measuring ingredients. I accept your apology. I knew I was right all along. I'm just glad that you've seen the light. I told her about scales and cups being inaccurate, about getting deeply into the philosophy of measurement and what that means, and I told her about Nancy's peanut butter cookie. But Eva was very clear when she came to us

that she wanted a number, a clean conversion from grams to cups. And after a lot of work, we did find a number, even if it's not the number. After checking a bunch of sources, the consensus we found was that a cup of butter was 227 grams. And since that was the problem I set out to solve, I shared it with Eva, including, of course, a million caveats.

And then I asked her how she felt about it. I think coming to terms with the reality that you can never get a true value is almost like an existential question about the nature of the universe. Because you're right. question about the nature of the universe because you're right no one can no one's gonna test my little scale i got for like 15 pounds however many years ago no one's gonna be able to prove to me that my cup that i got from another shop is exactly the same as someone else in you know utah's cup whatever um so i think like learning to make my peace with that I think that's where that's where I land on the one hand I'm like sorry that I can't say to you with certitude that I'm going to give you the best conversion ever but at the same time I'm also like you know what I really

did my due diligence I'm chalking this one up as a win I take it I take it as a win I'm gonna stick that number on my fridge and I'm also really excited to make those cookies because I have been looking for a good peanut butter cookie recipe for, I mean, since I was like 15. I think also it's true that learning to like play a bit more and be a bit less anal about these sorts of precise things is good for me. I actually run, I mean, this is just by the by, but I started an art club last year that is called Bad Art Club. And that is just having

my friends come to my house and do some bad art together and eat pasta. And the whole point was to try and get myself out of needing to do things accurately all the time. Instead, let's like, we did potato printing. We do like terrible watercolors. So maybe I need to have like bad cooking day. We just make up some stuff. Could you do like a weekly thing called Discipline Club where you like bring me in and make me do things the correct way? Because I only ever do things the half-assed, weird, backward way.

I feel like that would help me a lot. I can imagine us in the kitchen having some, yeah, disagreements. Hyperfix was produced by Emma Cortland and Amor Yates. It was also edited this week by Emma Cortland and Amor Yates. It was hosted by me, Alex Goldman. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cyl. It was hosted by me, Alex Goldman. The music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and also by me a little bit. It was engineered by Merritt Jacob, fact-checking by Sonia Avakian. Special thanks this week to Joe Calderon and Cousin Margie.

As I said at the top of the show, after these two episodes, we'll be back in November. You can learn more and get access to bonus content at hyperfixpod.com. Also, this show absolutely cannot exist without your problems to solve. So head over to hyperfixpod.com. There's a little submission window there. You can tell us your troubles. We'll do our best to fix them. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you soon. Radiotopia from PRX.