Dad's Root Beer Crate. Photo: eBay.

Several weeks ago, I covered my co-worker's wedding in Louisville, Ky., and raved about how she doubled her wedding cakes as centerpieces. It got me thinking: Everyone attending our wedding knows that both Jon and I are serious foodies. I want to incorporate food into our decor too, but I don't want to overdo it (and believe me, that wouldn't be hard!).

With the cost of food eternally increasing, I need to come up with other ways to incorporate our passion into our cocktail hour and reception. With the help of eBay and Amazon, I think I'll be able to pull it off. I have a vision of filling up old crates with bright, white hydrangeas and placing them by the bars.

Taking that idea one step further, I started a search on eBay for wine crates and stumbled across an antique Dad's Root Beer crate, which just so happens to be one of Jon and my father's favorite root beers. Five days of bidding and this puppy was mine!

Check out more of my finds after the jump!

Consumers have been told for years how bad soda is for the body. It doesn't matter if the drink is regular or diet. Even if we're not sure exactly what is so bad, it's supposedly common knowledge that it is.

I know that I shouldn't, but I do drink a little coke every day. I'm not a coffee person, so I have a cup of Coca Cola in the morning. So I really did not want to know precisely what Coke does to the body. I found an article over at Healthbolt that breaks down, step by step, what happens when you drink Coke. It is not a pretty picture. The article claims you're hit with a sugar rush, it leaches calcium and other vitamins from your body and flushes them out with a diuretic effect.**

Didn't Coca Cola come out with a vitamin-added beverage? What happens to those vitamins? I drink way more water than anything else, but I don't want to give up my morning Coke. So, anything in moderation?


**I have been informed that this article is mostly sensationalized and partly false. Please, only take the information with a grain of salt.

Everyone nowadays is concerned about the environment. Big business is especially concerned with its image. It wants the valuable consumers that a good green image can bring.

Coca Cola is no different, of course. The soft drink giant has already taken a number of steps to green-ify its image. The beverage maker has already pledged to recycle all of its plastic packaging in the US. Now it's time to tackle aluminum. Coca Cola has now decided that it will recycle 100% of the aluminum cans produced in the US.

To coordinate everything, the drink maker even created a whole division dedicated to collecting and recycling all of its waste packaging. Coca Cola Recycling just built a plant in South Carolina. The division says that the aluminum recycling initiative will use 95% less energy and reduce carbon emissions by 95% than creating new cans.

So here you go; another big company working to beef up its green image. I think it's great. A company as big as Coca Cola recycling all of its waste can make a huge impact on what goes in the landfills. It also makes a lot of business sense. So this kind of thing is a win-win for everyone.

The highest court in India has demanded that Coca-Cola and Pepsi reveal the chemical composition and ingredients of their products after a study that was released on Wednesday showed that the soft drinks contain high levels of insecticides.

The two presiding justices have given both Coca Cola and Pepsi just four weeks to submit a reply, otherwise the court will suspend sales in India. However, Shreyas Patel, a lawyer at Fox Mandal Little realizes that "no one is going to give away a 120-year-old secret, especially in a country like India. Someone would go and make it themselves."

Obviously, he never met these ladies, who already have.

Three people were charged yesterday by federal prosecutors for stealing confidential information from the Coca-Cola Company's Atlanta Headquarters. Joya Williams, administrative assistant to a top executive, Ibrahim Dimson and Edmund Duhaney "were arrested on charges of wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling Coke trade secrets," federal prosecutors said. Specifically, they stole insider documents and a bottled sample of one of Coke's newest, unreleased products and were planning to sell them to Coke rival, PepsiCo.

Dimson contacted Pepsi via a letter, mailed in an official Coca-Cola envelope, and asked for more than $80,000 for the stolen documents and drink sample. Pepsi contacted Coke and the authorities were brought in. The investigation culminated when an undercover FBI agent offered to pay $1.5 million for other trade secrets from Coke.

Both Coke and Pepsi complied with and assisted the FBI and other authorities during their investigation. Coke says that it will be difficult to overcome this "breach of trust" from Williams, who "[rifled] through corporate files and [stuffed] documents and a new Coca-Cola product into a personal bag" - actions which were caught on the company surveillance videos - and that they will review its "review its information protection policies, procedures and practices."

Coca Cola is now selling 12-ounce plastic bottles of its products, the same size as the classic cans, but conveniently resealable. I have heard heated debates whether the soda tastes better in bottles or cans. I usually prefer Coke in cans to Coke in bottles, because I can't drink the whole bottle before the soda becomes flat. 20-ounces of soda are too much for me most of the time.  If you like the convenience (or flavor) of bottled Coke, but find that the 20-ounce size is too large for you to finish or too difficult to cram in your lunchbox, keep an eye out for these little guys at supermarkets and superstores in your area.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

Today's Wall Street Journal featured a front-page article about the demand for Mexican-made Coca Cola in the U.S. Mexican Coke is made with cane sugar, unlike American Coke, which is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. While some soda aficionados like Mexican Coke for its supposedly cleaner taste and better mouth feel, its main market in the U.S. is to Mexican immigrants. While Coca Cola authorizes several bottlers to distribute its products in Mexico, the company is continually trying to stop the importation of those soft drinks into the U.S. for fear that they'll compete with the sodas bottled here. Since the bottles aren't actually counterfeit, they're still legal to import. The results are slightly covert networks of distributors that import Mexican Coke to the U.S. and then distribute it throughout the country. The WSJ traces a few bottles from Mexico to Georgia.