"Recipes in cups are one thing I cannot understand"
??
You drink out of cups every day; this is what humans, even you understand.
'A scale' is inapplicable while you're buying food or reading labels.
Why use a scale when everyone knows what a cup and teaspoon are? They are human measurements.
But it doesn't matter what you use, what matters is what people understand, and they don't understand grams and millilitres.
It's been identified as a health problem: people don't have an intuition for the units on labels - there should be imperial units to help them understand.
As for litre/gallon or pound/kg I don't think it matters ... but consider for a moment that everyone in Canada that I know still uses pounds. And feet/inches for height.
I don't know a single person that can tell you their weight in Kg, maybe heir height in meters but they'd have to think about it.
My cupboard has cups in all kinds of sizes. Which one is the right one to use as a measurement? And for baking there's quite a big difference if my cups are 150 ml or 350 ml, especially when paired with counted ingredients like eggs. That's the problem with cups.
All of your regular coffee cups are exactly 250ml.
Regular people use them for basic baking all the time, like making pancakes.
'Cups' are still better measures than ml because even you, in your self-acclaimed ignorance have a sense of how much a cup is whereas people do not have any idea how much '300ml' is.
Canadians have no clue what 10ml of anything is.
Canadians will continue to use feet and pounds for personal measure, despite being surrounded by total metric system - that should tell you something.
Do you order beer in ml? Or pints?
Seriously, do you know anyone that orders a 473ml of beer?
So why pints? And not ml? Because it makes sense.
Everything should be in metric, but many things should also be Imperial because metric is not useful for many common measurements.
The entire construction industry in Canada still uses Imperial, and it also weirdly makes sense. Inches and feet are slightly more approachable at smaller scale.
How can you be sure that "all of your regular coffee cups are exactly 250ml"? And what about teaspoon? And everything else?
Everyone here is obviously biased toward his/her own measurement system based on our experience, but the fact that "3 cups and a half of milk" is more precise than "875mL of milk" is clearly false.
I didn't say anything about Imperial being more precise.
I'm saying it's often more useful.
1 cup mix, 1 cup milk + 1 egg.
1 pint of beer.
1 teaspoon of sugar.
These are things everyone can understand.
You can put the ml on the side of the label.
"That guy is 6 feet tall, about 180 lbs."
Is better than metric for most people.
"I'll have a glass of wine" instead of "I'll have 240 ml of wine"
Any one of you who orders beer by the 'ml' can keep arguing with me, but I suspect you all order 'pints' in which case you should consider for a moment why you do that.
For 300 ml there are measuring cups that have a scale on the side. Same for 250 ml by the way. Incidentally, I wouldn't be sure I could actually measure 1⅕ cups of anything (under your assumption that a cup is exactly 250 ml (Do I fill them completely? One cm below the top? And while about 50 % of the cups here seem to roughly fit that size, the others are different.)).
I don't order beer at all, but around here it's usually ordered as 500 ml (a little further south, especially around October, they tend to order 1 liter).
I live in Canada we use ml and nobody orders beer in ml.
5 grams of sugar? Nobody knows what that means.
They know what 5 tea-spoons is though.
I'll be $100 that if they put 'teaspoons of sugar' instead of grams, people would be shocked. There are videos showing how much sugar in a can of Coke, and it's largely because people are oblivious to the units on the label, which we can all technically read.
And here I thought 1 Imperial cup was ~284 ml... 1 US cup is closer at 240 ml. Might get away with that discrepancy when cooking, but when baking, not so much.
Especially if you're using things like flour where you get different quantities which if you sift it, or spoon it into the cup, or scoop it from the bag.
Cups are fine for rough and ready, but terrible for baking.
