On EU product labels, metric units are mandatory whereas non-metric units are optional. On US product labels, both metric and US customary (USC) units are mandatory for most products. So a company that wants to sell a product in the EU and the US must use metric and USC on the label unless it produces separate labels for the two markets.
Continue reading “How US labelling requirements undermine honest labelling in the UK”
A key point of President Obama’s State of the Union address on 13 February was the proposed EU-US trade agreement, which has been under preliminary discussion for the past year. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/13/state-of-the-union-free-trade-europe). As this agreement is supposed to remove regulatory barriers to trade, there should now be a serious opportunity to remove the US ban on metric-only labelling of most packages.
Continue reading “Will EU-US trade agreement bring in metric-only labelling in the US?”
In June last year, we published a time line up to 1980 showing progress towards the adoption of a single, simple, logical and coherent measurement system in the British Isles. We now bring this story up to date.
When consulting a reference book from 1896, we came across an article about imperial measures which provides a timely reminder that, even in its heyday, this ‘system’ was not as straightforward as some would now have us believe.
Most of us buy our Christmas turkey from a supermarket, trussed and accompanied by cooking instructions. But for those of our readers who have obtained a bird elsewhere, and are wondering how to cook this unfamiliar monster, we have some pointers to success.
Continue reading “Tips for cooking that turkey”
A recent survey of their web sites leads us to speculate on where retailers see themselves: most plump for the present, but a few appear to favour the last century.
A pub in Worcester, that for ten years served draught beer by the litre, has now closed due to rising costs.
A recent consultation by the UK Department of Health about food labelling has drawn attention to two long-standing issues, both relating to food energy and the calorie.
Continue reading “Two enduring controversies are highlighted by a food labelling consultation”
We look at some of the consequences when there is more than one option for supplementary units on product labels.
On 15 July 1862, the Select Committee on Weights and Measures of the UK Parliament published a report recommending the adoption of the metric system in the UK. That was 150 years ago. It was also less than forty years after the coming into force of the Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which should have provided Britain and Ireland with ‘correct and uniform’ standards of measures. So what had gone wrong in the intervening years, and what then happened to the Committee’s recommendations?
Continue reading “The report that led the UK from one muddle to another”
Metric Views 