<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: ScentofCedar</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Marguerite, is a kilo two pounds and a little more, do you know?
It seems that food there must be very expensive?
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A kilo is 2.2 lbs. I was working after school as a checkout chick when we metricated. We'd been doing imperial and metric calculations for ten years at school already, so we were familiar with it. Once you're used to it, it is so much easier. husband & I talk to the kids about feet, yards, miles, gallons and pints and the kids just look blank. I hate to think how they would cope if we talked of chains, furlongs, rods, poles and perches!
A kilo is 2.2 lbs, so they just made the flour bags and sugar bags slightly bigger. Out 'stick' of butter used to be 8 oz, but 250 g comes very close, which is what it is now.
Liquids - a litre is 1000 ml (naturally) and a pint is 600 ml. A cup varies depending on US or British/Australian, I think ours is 200 ml and US is 250 ml, but I'd need to check. Most of my recipes are Aus/Brit.
To get the connection in metric, as to what weighs how much and occupies what volume, here is the VERY simple rule - water is the standard. It freezes at 0C and boils at 100C (at sea level and standard pressures). A litre of water weighs 1 Kg. A cubic centimetre of water = 1 ml, weighs 1 gm. I do a lot of liquid measures in my recipes, by weight. 360 ml of milk weighs 360 gm.
A centimetre is a hundredth of a metre. A kilometre is five eighths of a mile. In a thunderstorm we still count seconds from the lightning flash to the thunder roll and five seconds still equals a mile, then we calculate back so we can tell the kids how many kilometres (or metres - some of our storms hit close!)
Some of our food IS expensive and getting more so. With so many farmers having had to sell off their stock or let the animals die, or lose them in drought or flood (it never rains but it pours), there is not a lot of meat available. Right now we're getting a lot of spring lamb. The price is set by demand. In years past, some cuts were not popular, such as lamb shank, and so they were cheap. Poorer people learned to make fabulous meals from poor cuts and now they're fashionable. lamb shanks can cost $16 a kilo. A rack of lamb (really, just neck chops) now costs $20 a kilo. The cheapest lamb cut is forequarter chops which sell at $12 a kilo. But if I buy a whole side of lamb (or a whole sheep) I can get it for $6.50 a kilo. This of course includes the rack of lamb and the lamb shank(s), all at $6.50. I save up the frozen shanks and racks for a gourmet treat later on when we have enough (and usually when lamb is almost unavailable again).
Beef is getting really expensive and even lamb is now, with farmers having fewer animals in stock and hence fewer lambs being born. The meat is getting to be a poorer quality also.
Chicken - it's farmed intensively, close to the city so they get enough rain to have a water supply on the farms. You don't run chicken way out in the country - it's the bigger animals that need the cheaper land out past the Great Divide. And there, of course, is where the land is a dustbowl.
In New Zealand they get a lot more rain, their fields are GREEN (and so are we, with envy at seeing them) but still we saw farmers with their animals "on the long paddock" or grazing on the nature strip on the sides of the highways. They have drought too, but their desert country still gets more rain than we do. New Zealand meat - much cheaper than ours and the quality was brilliant.
We excel at fruit & vegetables. A lot of the coastal tropical areas in Queensland and northern NSW provide a lot of food. The other breadbasket of the east, the Riverina, was artificially irrigated through the Snowy Mountains Scheme and the land is now showing the unexpected damage of high salinity which was never expected. It should be an object lesson to the rest of the world to NOT build dams to turn rivers inland. With hindsight - a bad idea. It has fed our country for 60 years but the land will soon be worthless for hundreds more years. Maybe thousands.
Natural disasters which affect our farming can push prices up. When Queensland's banana plantations were badly damaged by Cyclone Larry a few months after Katrina, bananas were so rare they were selling for $20 a kilo. Now they're back down to $2 a kilo. If we buy fruit in season and in bulk we do well. Strawberries are cheap at the moment, and then comes mangoes. Pineapples are getting cheaper - about $3 each at the moment. Mushrooms are about $6 a kilo. Potatoes vary according to how many you get, but usually $2-3 a kilo. Tomatoes vary wildly - our cheap ones are about $4 a kilo.
Remember, these are all Aussie dollars.
Dinner last night - a beef stir-fry with oyster sauce, ginger and cashew nuts. I bought a whole beef rump for $12 a kilo and asked them to slice it into steaks. One large and one small steak in a stir-fry will feed six of us. Tonight - maybe a butter chicken with basmati rice, or a chicken stir-fry with bok choy. Haven't decided.
Marg
