Monday, February 09, 2009

something stupid and confusing:

Honey is sold by weight, not volume. We have a 16oz bottle of honey in our pantry, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why it would be sold this way. According to the bottle, the serving size is one tablespoon, and there are approximately 22 tablespoons in the bottle. It also says that one cup is about 12oz.

So if I use a half cup for a recipe, I'm using 4oz, but six ounces by weight, leaving 10oz left. But the internet says that there's 2 tablespoons per fluid ounce, meaning there's only 11oz in the bottle to begin with. So there's really 7oz left?

Now I consider myself a fairly smart person. I think I'm pretty good at problem solving, and I was always good at logic problems, spatial relationships, and figuring things out in general.

Though today, I'm standing in the pantry eating a bowl of cereal and looking this label, putting numbers together, and a strange feeling overtakes me. The only thing I can think to compare it to is the reaction your car might have if all the oil had drained from the engine instantly and the entire thing suddenly locked up, lurching the car to an abrupt and skidding halt. While on a nice drive on the interstate.

That's the reaction my brain was having.

Hours later I still can't wrap my head around it.

6 comments:

Caleb said...

Confusing to be sure. Obviously an oz. more or less of honey shouldn't make or break your recipe but it is an interesting quandary.

To the library!

Cass said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cass said...

i wrote a comment, cal's fan flew off of his window sill with a crash, i deleted the comment by mistake, then my brain exploded. and i think i wrote my brain exploding in the last one. was that in english?

Jay M. said...

It's not the missing ounce from the bottle that's frustrating. It's that things like honey, sugar, and flour should not be sold by weight! It almost always gets poured into a measuring container, not onto a scale, before being used.

Imagine if you bought steaks or bread by the ounce (volume, not weight!)

Bring on the metric system (or something similar), my brain can't handle all the conversions.

Marta said...

If only we were British - they do all cooking measurements by weight!

Anonymous said...

Regardless of the measurement system used, I think this blog item is worth being a short newspaper article. We've all probably had that similar experience of trying to translate litres into ounces, pounds, or cubic rutabaga, or whatever. I laughed out loud. It reminded me of Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language". dadm