Science and Baking

This is possibly the most random topic I will ever blog about, but I just wanted to point something out.

Baking is possibly the least precise practice on the planet.

I laughed at myself just rereading that sentence now, but I think about it every time I make food from a recipe. I find it hard to reconcile the baker in me with the ex-science-olympian. How can I put any trust into a measuring system that insists that every recipe on the planet uses the same intervals of flour that are so different from one cup to the next? If measurements mattered in the baking world, then you would have things like "recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups 3 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon of flour at [this amount] of density" instead of "recipe calls for 2 cups of flour."

Anyway, there you have it. Also, this is why I laugh at people who measure anything larger than a tablespoon by scraping the extra off the top.