An excellent piece from the generally excellent Metric Views on food energy content labelling. A calorie is a nonsense unit that means nothing; a joule is a real unit that makes sense.
One of the things that I very much like about moving to Australia is that, for all its stereotyping as backward, the country has almost completely moved over to sane units of measurement. People talk about their weight in kilos, they drive kilometres, energy on drinks cans is stated in joules. Stupid measurements are a thing of the past, rather than having been retained to appease fogeys and xenophobic bigots.
For all my disapproval of democracy, I’d certainly vote for any party that promised to finish and enforce metrication in the UK. Particularly if the enforcement was on pain of death (wouldn’t it have been lovely had the Metric Martyrs [*] actually been burned at the stake?)
[*] or “swindlers who refused to display their goods’ correct prices”, as they should more accurately be called.
I know you're down under, but this is blogging in reverse: you should write a reasoned post, not wallow in pointless trolling – that happens in the comments, subsequently.
I'm fairly sure I've got it the right way round. Start here and read forwards. If that fails, go to Dan's blog.
It doesn't matter a damn what measurements are used as long as they are widely understood and consistently applied. I've long lobbied for all items to be displayed in base 29 Wibblecrack units but unreasonably people like to stick to what they know, bastards.
Oz can take the high ground when they finally serve beer in the same sized glasses throughout the country, they would of course have to discover beer first though.