Going Metric
American Foods and Drugs Measure Up
by Judith Randal

     Years ago, nearly every principality, dukedom and kingdom had
its own set of weights and measures that often differed wildly from
standards in effect a few miles away. That worked well enough for
small, self-contained societies. But as the horizons of commerce
broadened, local measurement units no longer sufficed.
     Today, in a time of rapid transport and instantaneous
communication, there is only one marketplace and it is global.
Trading in it requires a common, standard set of measurements
worldwide. We have such a set of standards. It is popularly known
as the metric system and more formally as the International System
of Units (SI).
     Until now, the United States has been very much like the Boy
Scout in the Labor Day parade whose proud mother exclaimed, "Look,
they are all out of step but Johnny." Except for two minuscule
players in the global marketplace--Liberia and Myanmar (Burma)--
ours has been the only trading nation not routinely conducting its
commercial affairs in metric units.
     This has been a source of problems: If we sell rice or flour
by the pound, how does this sit with a purchaser in some foreign
country who is used to buying rice or flour by the kilogram? And
what does it do to our competitive position if U.S. products are
the only ones on a store shelf in a distant land labeled in weight
units that make no sense to would-be purchasers?
     Through a 1992 amendment to the 1967 Fair Packaging and
Labeling Act, Congress has ordered that the packaging of many
consumer products display both the customary inch-pound and metric
designations. Final regulations for products in the Food and Drug
Administration's domain--most processed foods, virtually all
nonprescription drugs, and personal care items ranging from liquid
makeup to sunscreens--are expected soon.
     Once the regulations are final, manufacturers of the products
will have a grace period to use up any labels already on hand that
disclose only inch-pound system measurements. And some of the
hundreds of thousands of products in FDA's jurisdiction--adhesive
bandage strips are an example--will not be subject to the new
requirement, at least not immediately. Meanwhile, because some U.S.
companies have realized the benefits of "going metric," their
products are already labeled in both metric and traditional units.
Typical is this notation on a can of condensed tomato soup: "10 3/4
oz.--305 grams." And the labels on prescription drugs have had
metric designations for many years.

Switch Is On
     Since mid-century, all other English-speaking nations have
made the switch to metric. For example, both Canada and Australia,
longtime adherents to the English system of measurement, are now
comfortably in the metric camp--as indeed is England itself.
Conversion to metric in other English-speaking countries was not
done overnight or without public information  and education
campaigns. Starting in 1970, Australia phased in new measurements
one at a time with a series of "M-days" (M for metric), each
preceded by a barrage of publicity through the news media. As each
deadline passed, an old standard of weight or volume or length or
area disappeared and a metric one took its place. Canadians
followed a similar course of gradualism over a 10-year period
starting in 1973. Today, according to an official at the Canadian
embassy in Washington, "older people remember the old measures, but
younger people don't know what a gallon is."
     If gradualism is the key to success in metric conversion, the
American experience should be a cakewalk. We have been on the
metric track for almost 120 years; indeed, it is an irony of
history that the world's last major holdout was one of the original
signatories to the first international metric agreement. This was
the Treaty of the Meter, signed in Paris in 1875. The United States
was the only English-speaking country among the treaty's 17
original signers.
     Even earlier--in 1866--President Andrew Johnson signed an act
making metric measurements legal anywhere in the United States. In
1893, metric units were declared to be the country's fundamental
standards of measurement. This means, for instance, that the yard
is, in effect, a derivative measurement unit equal to 0.9144 meter,
and the pound a unit equal to 0.454 kilogram.
     In the late 1970s, the American government started a push to
metric, but its momentum slowed in the following decade. Even so,
some changes were made--for example, the beverage industry switched
from "English" measures to their metric counterparts. Most big
bottles of soft drinks are now labeled "2 liters." Spirits, once
packaged in pints, fifths, quarts, and gallons are now sold in
roughly equivalent metric units: 375 milliliters (mL), 750 mL, and
the like.
     "Nobody's stopped drinking because of the changeover," says
Gary Carver, Ph.D., of the Department of Commerce's National
Institute of Standards and Technology, who plays a major role in
coordinating U.S. government activities in the metric field.

Dual Labeling
     Much of what has been done to date has been at the instigation
of business, spurred by America's need to better its bargaining
position in a growing and increasingly competitive global
marketplace. The steps taken by Congress under the Fair Packaging
and Labeling Act to ensure that metric gets at least equal billing
with the old inch-pound system on a wide variety of foods and other
commodities and products will help still more to bring that about.
     "Dual labeling" (as the practice of displaying both old and
new measurements is known) will probably eventually disappear,
leaving metric units the only ones on product labels. For now,
however, the use of both systems will give consumers unfamiliar
with metric a chance to learn about it. Meanwhile, children in
school from the very earliest years--even kindergartners in some
school systems--are learning about metric and will be fully up to
speed on this system when they, in turn, become consumers in their
own right. Indeed, there are many middle-aged Americans today who
learned metric when they were in school decades ago, but who may
have forgotten the system because they  never put it to practical
use.
     Fortunately for them and for today's shoppers who did not
learn metric in school, there are handy approximations between the
old, familiar units and metric ones. (See box.) Although virtually
all prescription drugs have long been dispensed and labeled in
metric terms, consumers may need some extra help for a few OTC
conversions. For example, a 5-grain aspirin tablet is 325
milligrams in metric terms.
     Some vitamins are often rated in international units, but IU
is a measure of biological activity, not weight or volume, so the
congressional mandate for metric labeling doesn't apply. However,
vitamin manufacturers that use IU designations are being pushed
toward metric labeling by the U.S. Pharmacopeia (U.S.P), a private
agency that works closely with FDA. Starting in July, any vitamin
product claiming to meet U.S.P. standards and saying so on its
label also has to disclose its content in metric terms.

Easy Does It
     As anyone who has traveled abroad understands, metric is quite
easy to get used to. It's based entirely on the decimal system--
everything is divisible or multipliable by factors of 10. For
example, a kilogram is 1,000 grams, a liter is 1,000 milliliters,
a meter is 1,000 millimeters (or 100 centimeters) and a kilometer
is 1,000 meters. Products sold by volume are in liters, those sold
by weight are in grams, and those sold by length are in meters (or
decimal multiples or fractions of them). No confusion there.
Contrast these units with pounds for dry weight (16 ounces), quarts
for liquid measure (32 fluid ounces--and fluid ounces aren't the
same as dry ounces), yards at 3 feet or 36 inches each, and miles
consisting of 1,760 yards or 5,280 feet. You don't have to be a
rocket scientist, as the saying goes, to see that metric is
actually more consistent than traditional U.S. measures.
     And you don't have to be a master chemist to convert cookbook
recipes to metric either. For "1 teaspoon" in an old-style recipe,
read "5 milliliters (mL)," for "1 tablespoon" read "15 mL," and for
"1 cup" of liquid read "250 mL." More and more cookbooks nowadays
contain conversion tables--including the difficult and crucial one
from Fahrenheit measurement of temperature to Celsius--and
measuring cups are available marked in metric on one side and
ounces-pint on the other.
     Commenting that the metric system is easier and more logical
than inch-pound, Commerce's Carver says, "but even if it wasn't
we'd have to convert simply to be in step commercially with the
rest of the world. Not to do so would be to continue to impose
trade barriers on ourselves." With 25 million Canadians to the
north and 85 million Mexicans to the south, all allied with us in
the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA) and with billions
more customers worldwide subject to the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT), says Carver, "we have to go metric."

Survivors
     Old ways die hard, to be sure, and there won't be a "metric
police" patrolling the shopping malls, so it is reasonable to
expect that some inch-pound units will survive in folk culture even
after they disappear from formal commerce. The Australians  are
simon-pure metrists--except for their dogged adherence to "shouting
a schooner" when they visit the local pub, a schooner being a large
mug that Australian beer drinkers simply refused to give up when
metric came in. Similarly, some older people in Germany refer to a
Pfund when buying half a kilogram of some bulk product, a Pfund
being an old measure equivalent to the English pound. Britain, now
otherwise solidly metric, still sticks to miles on the highway and,
in popular parlance, you still hear some Britons talk of their
weight as being so many stone. (A stone is the equivalent of 14
pounds.) However, petrol (gasoline) is sold by the liter, spelled
litre in the United Kingdom.
     If traditionalists question the historic legitimacy of the
metric system, they need only consider Thomas Jefferson's efforts
to devise a coherent system of measurements for the fledgling
United States based on multiples of 10. The United States was
already a leader on the coinage front in the English-speaking
world, having abandoned the old pounds-shillings-pence system that
survived elsewhere well into the 20th century in favor of the more
manageable 100 cents to the dollar. Jefferson, one of the brightest
intellects of his time, had been a U.S. diplomat in Paris when the
French metric system took shape and had been impressed by its logic
and coherence. As Secretary of State in 1790, when President
Washington asked him to prepare alternative sets of measurement
standards for consideration by Congress, Jefferson was ready. One
of the two proposals--reportedly Jefferson's preference--was based
on multiples of 10, just like the metric system, but Congress did
not adopt it at that time.

Fahrenheit Meets Celsius
     Metric today is not only the lingua franca of commerce, but of
science as well. Pick up any medical journal, for instance, and all
the quantities you see in the text will be in metric. Patients are
described as being so-many centimeters tall, weighing so-many
kilograms, and having a body temperature of so-many degrees Celsius
(37 C is the same as "normal" body temperature of 98.6 F).
     The relationship between Fahrenheit and Celsius is, in fact,
the only conversion that most consumers may need to use that is
somewhat tricky. But even it can be mastered, according to Gloria
Marconi, a Silver Spring, Md., illustrator whose husband, Ercole,
often asks her to make baked goods from recipes in the metric
system cookbooks he brought with him from his native Italy. How to
convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit for oven temperatures?
     If your oven registers in Fahrenheit and the recipe tells you
the baking temperature in Celsius, just multiply the Celsius number
by 9 and then divide by 5. Add 32 to the result, and there's your
Fahrenheit oven setting. (For example, if the cookbook calls for a
Celsius setting of 220: 220 x 9 = 1980 – 5 = 396 + 32 = 428; 425 is
close enough for your Fahrenheit oven setting.)
     It's only human for Americans to be creatures of habit, but
the inch-pound system habit has put us at a disadvantage with our
competitors overseas and so has become a luxury we can no longer
afford. The faster and more enthusiastically we embrace
metrication, the more prosperous a nation we are likely to be.  The
Food and Drug Administration, with its product labeling
requirements, is committed to do its part in this effort. n

Judith Randal is a writer in Lovettsville, Va.
Metric Shortcuts
     Here are some tricks to make adapting to the metric system
quick and easy:
-   A kilogram is a little more than 2 pounds (or, to put it
another way, a pound is quite close to half a kilogram).
-    A liter and a quart are quite close (1 quart = 0.946 liter).
At the gasoline pump, one gallon is only about 5 percent less than
4 liters.
-    A meter is about 10 percent more than a yard.
-    A hectare is close to 2 1/2 acres.