So many of us are lactose intolerant these days, but there are so many milk substitutes that it's difficult to know where to turn! Find out where to go, and how to incorporate these substitutes into your cooking.

Earlier today, Bob Sassone posted here about his milk gone bad. Anatomic Factory together with artist Bombo were thinking about the same subject. They created these bizarre milk carton shaped lights. They look like plain milk cartons, but they reveal a weird world of mold playing in the carton when you turn them on.

I choose to dump my old milk and not think too much about what might be going on in there. However, I must admit that these would make for really cute kitchen lamps.

What's next? A light designed to reveal the mold on an apple juice glass left out on the counter for too long? Umm.. wait... that happened in my house, no art light needed.

Time to check in with our sister site GreenDaily for some environmental/food news:

• Water bottles: filters on the go; why we probably don't need as much water as everyone says we do

• Produce: not enough land to grow local stuff?; neighborhood gardening; cantaloupe salmonella scare; raw food safety tips; urban agriculture at its finest; try what one poster calls a "superfood berry"; how far has your fruit traveled?
  

• Milk: California might ban it; buy the best container; try organic; consumers fight back

• Chocolate is even better with when it comes complete with antioxidants and carbon offsets

• Junk Food: Cadbury goes green; organic ice cream; Sun Chips get sunnier
  

• Ball parks: all-you-can-eat seating; will the Nationals stadium be named after PETA?
  

"Milk In the Land: Ballad of an American Drink," a documentary about the ubiquitous white beverage, has shown at several film festivals across the U.S. and is now hitting Philly. Directors Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum show us the ins and outs of the cow's milk industry, revealing its interesting past. But don't expect a thoughtful retrospective on the Great American Drink - this film unearths often grimace-inducing secrets about milk, questions its nutritional value, and spotlights the milk extraction process in farms run by agribusiness corporations.

The film features several theatrical elements, including testimonials by industry professionals and stop-motion animation, to explore the drink inside and out. It has been called "fascinating" by some critics, but one FilmCAN reviewer was pretty disappointed, saying the film lacked detail and that the interviewees provided stuttered, unconvincing arguments.

Despite the occasional bad review, Milk sounds pretty worthwhile - similar to the string of string of recent documentaries on the underbelly of the food industry, even if the film itself isn't the best, you'll undoubtedly walk out of the theater with some newfound food and business knowledge under your belt.

Want to know what to do when your milk has started to turn?

I thought I'd give you a little musical accompaniment to your coffee-drinking/blog-reading/procrastinating this morning. Blur's "Coffee and TV" is, hands down, the best music video starring an anthropomorphic carton of milk. Seriously. Try to find a better music video starring a carton of milk. I dare you.

Without giving too much away, the video's googley-eyed star makes his way through the city, encountering danger, suspense, and love on his quest. The video is worth watching through to the end, if not for the classic song, then for the oddly sweet, albeit slightly morbid, ending.

Ah, milk. It's tasty, it's satisfying, and it makes a great music video star.

I've loved experimenting with drinking chocolates this winter. Swirling shaved chocolate into a saucepan of milk produces a far better result than anything I achieve with hot cocoa mix. I usually use dark chocolate, and sometimes add sugar until the mixture reaches my desired sweetness. That is, until recently -- the mother of my close friend is Colombian, and she brought us a bar of Colombian chocolate designed for melting into hot beverages. I can't get enough of it.

The bar is already sweetened perfectly, so you just add it to hot milk and allow it to melt. Once melted, you beat the mixture with a molinillo -- a chocolate whisker with designs native to Colombia, Mexico and other Latin American countries. The result is a deliciously foamy drink with a great chocolate kick. The product I used is called Sweet Chocolate, and the brand is Sol. I found the cheapest bar ($3.99) at Latin Pantry. But I'm sure there are others out there from Colombia as well as from other countries, so please share your favorites!

If you don't have a molinillo, you can use a normal whisk to achieve ideal foaminess. Feel free to add cinnamon as they do in Colombia, or syrups and extracts of your choice.

America (at least the segment of the population that reads the New York Times Dining & Wine section) has already embraced artisanal raw milk cheeses, boutique breads, bacon from pigs hand-fed on nothing but acorns.

Now, according to the lead story in the Wednesday Dining & Wine section, small-batch milk, cream and butter are the next Big Thing in refined gourmandise. In the article, It-chef Thomas Keller of Napa's French Laundry raves about butter handmade at a small Vermont creamery. "It has a different flavor profile and nuances throughout the year," he rhapsodizes. Fresh local dairy products are great, certainly - I buy pints of thick, downy cream from a nearby farm, and love nothing more than a hunk of baguette slathered with good butter, paved with sliced radishes and sprinkled with sea salt.

But my favorite part of the story had less to do with food and more to do with seventh-grade giggles: a quote from Nancy Nipples, founder of the Pike Place Market Creamery in Seattle. Full legal name: Nancy Nipples the Milkmaid.

And that's an order there, buddy. If you spill milk today, maybe while pouring a glass or putting some in your coffee or perhaps in your cereal bowl, DON'T CRY OVER IT. Seriously.

Yup, it's National Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk Day. Not really sure what to do with this. Link to recipes that include some sort of milk in the ingredients? Nah, there's too many of them. So how about this: in the comments below list what type of milk you drink (skim, low fat, whole, 2%, etc) or maybe give a Heloise-ish tip on what to do if someone were to indeed spill milk on a rug (I'm assuming that will be the hardest area to clean, since your kitchen counter is pretty easy, as long as you don't let the milk stand there for a while).

It's already happened in Canada. It's in the process of happening in Great Britain. I wonder if it will ever happen in the U.S.? I am referring to changing the packaging for milk containers. In Canada and England (anywhere else?), milk can now be purchased in more environmentally friendly bags rather than plastic bottles.

Currently, most of the bottles used for milk are tossed into the garbage rather than be recycled. Add to that they're made of a high density polyethylene, which can be recycled albeit mainly in China. The bags use 75% less plastic than do the bottles we're currently used to. Less packaging means less waste.

The milk bags are easily stored, too. You just have to get any kind of reusable pitcher, or similar container. When you bring home your fresh bag of milk, simply empty the contents into your pitcher and store it in the fridge.

The bag of milk is a neat new concept. I think that if we're serious about reducing our impact on this planet, this may be a good change to make. I know it seems kind of weird, but it's not that different from our current milk containers. Also, it's not a big sacrifice. I put lots of products into a permanent container once I get it home. So here's to the bag of milk: may you be universally accepted in the near future and stick around far into it.

[Via ColdMud]

I'm assuming that you didn't take the day off from work to run half-naked through the streets of your neighborhood in celebration of Mardi Gras, which probably means you didn't start your day with Hurricanes and Brandy Milk Punches at 7 AM.

Starting the day with cafe au lait -- French for "coffee with milk" -- is a better option. It's not a latte. Cafe au lait is drip coffee with hot milk. After years and years of drinking coffee black -- no sugar, no cream, no love, baby -- I conceded to trying coffee with milk because I "had to" when I was at Cafe du Monde last month. I have to say, I have been drinking it this way at home for the last month since I've been back.

Oh, okay, so I'm using soy instead of regular milk.

After a decision earlier this month by Pennsylvania lawmakers to remove all mention of hormone-treated cows on milk containers, Governor Ed Rendell vehemently disagreed and reversed the issue, allowing the references to stay. The decision was initially enacted because State Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff said the labels might cause consumers to think the treated milk was somehow inferior to non-treated milk, therefore slowing sales.

Why the sudden change? Rendell, along with the Consumers Union, dairy farms, and even Ben and Jerry's representatives thought that consumers deserved the right to know how their drinks were being produced. However, dairies that do choose to label their milk as "hormone-free" also have to list a disclaimer that their milk is no safer than milk that does contain hormones. This is because, despite rumors that hormones cause girls to hit puberty earlier or cause certain types of cancer, no research has proven either of these statements.

However, this hasn't stopped Canada from banning use of the hormone, which is used because it supposedly boosts milk production by 10%. Canada's reasoning? They say it causes mastitis, or udder infection, and reduces the number of pregnancies.

What do you think? Do you want to know whether or not your milk comes from hormone-treated cows? And how much does this fact - whether or not the cows were treated - affect what kind of milk you buy?

As a company, once you find a marketing strategy that works, you usually stick with it. Nike had the swoosh, milk has the mustaches, and PETA? Well, they have naked women.

Over the years, PETA has used women celebs like Alicia Silverstone, Eva Mendes, and Cindy Crawford to encourage the masses not to wear fur or eat meat. And while they've gotten a lot of flak, they continue to pay women to drop trou for the good of the animals.

Today in Philadelphia, PETA's "lettuce ladies" (women wearing little more than lettuce-shaped undergarments) will be handing out soy turkey sandwiches to promote the company's "Turn over a new leaf: go vegetarian" campaign.

A few points that should be noted, here: PETA rarely uses men to advertise its messages. It did use MTV Jackass' Steve-O, who was nude, but the ad a) only showed his backside and b) was quite obviously in jest, poking fun at the typical oversexed PETA model and keeping in vein with the show's brand of humor. Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix have also done commercial spots for the organization - fully clothed. Somehow, I wonder if the effectiveness of the message is lost when we're too busy ogling Pam Anderson's generous chest to worry about what she's promoting.

Now, I'm all for soy products, either as meat replacements or as an addition to a healthy diet. Isn't it fascinating how, in campaigning to stop exploiting one living thing, another is exploited in its place? Maybe PETA should stop pointing its fingers at others for a second and turn the magnifying glass on itself.

Food for thought.

Listeria is being blamed for the deaths of two elderly men in Massachusetts.

The listeria was traced to a Shrewsbury, MA company called Whittier Farms. Two other people have gotten sick. Authorities are telling customers to throw out all Whittier Farms products that they might have in their homes. The brand names included in the notice are Whittier, Balance Rock, Spring Brook, Maple, and Schultz.

Listeria is often found in products such as cold cuts and hot dogs but can be found elsewhere as well. Many of us eat some form of listeria every year but we're not affected by it.

Here's some interesting news from a study conducted at Purdue University: eating liquid foods might make you eat more calories during the day, because our bodies register the calories a lot slower.

The tests were done on 120 men and women. On day one they were given a test lunch of a chicken sandwich and water, and were allowed to eat any meal they wanted later in the day. On the other days, a liquid or solid food was given along with the chicken sandwich (milk or cheese, coconut or coconut milk, and watermelon or watermelon juice). They could have as many sandwiches as they wanted after eating the samples and then recorded how full they were. This is all confusing to me, but I wonder if this is one of the reasons why people on liquid diets and diets that have liquid meal replacement options often gain weight later.

Though I wonder how accurate it is, since it was only a three day study. I'd like something with a little more depth, but it's an interesting start.