The fight to persuade Americans to ditch English units for the metric system in their everyday lives is largely lost. And now even some advocates of grams, meters and the like want to make a tactical retreat from the site of one of their few victories: the grocery aisle.

The nutrition labels that have been mandated by the federal government for nearly 20 years list nutrient quantities in grams. A serving of cereal might be one-quarter cup, but that amount contains, say, 2.5 grams of fat and 4 grams of sugar.

While the 95 percent of the world has converted to the metric system, the United States stuck with inches, feet, ounces, pounds, Fahrenheit, etc. Only two more countries accompany us in this resistance against adopting the International System of Units (SI): Liberia and Myanmar (Elliott-Gower). After more than 200 years, we are still “on the other side”. We need to fix it ASAP.
The very first opportunity to go metric was missed in the early 1800s, when “President Thomas Jefferson, an amateur scientist and mathematician, recognized the merits of metric, and there was a lot of pro-French, anti-British sentiment in the country”. Then, in nineteen century, the US government authorized the official use of metric measures, alongside British measures in 1866 and signed the Treaty of the Meter in 1875.