Over the holidays, I found a box of something that expired in 2018. I did not celebrate it’s birthday. — Dan

Communal refrigerators — the one in your workplace, for example — suffer from a specific, and gross problem: sometimes people put stuff in the fridge and then forget about it, allowing for old food to fester for days if not weeks on end. Foil-wrapped concoctions that used to be sandwiches, someone’s leftover takeout from who knows when, and, perhaps worst of all, that carton of milk whose sell-by date has faded into oblivion. And because no one wants to claim ownership for these now-rancid items, there’s no one who feels empowered to throw them out.

Ultimately, common sense wins out — some hero comes along and throws the inedible “food” into the trash. But not always. Sometimes, that rancid milk becomes a local hero. Just ask the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (better known as MIT)

Random Hall is the smallest dormitory at MIT, providing housing to about 90 students who live across eight floors. Each floor, per the dorm’s website, “has a complete kitchen with stove, microwave, dishwasher, and” — important for our purposes today — “up to four refrigerators.” In 1994, an MIT student named Justin O. Cave was living in Random Hall when he had a hankering for some mac and cheese, so he went shopping, buying the ingredients he’d need. But when he got back to his dorm, he realized he forgot an ingredient, and never made the mac and cheese. So he put the milk in the back of the fridge, unused and forgotten.

Ten months later, someone discovered it.

Most people would have thrown out the very spoiled milk at that point, but Cave and his floormates had another idea. It was approaching a full year of residency at Random, so on October 20, 1995 — a year after its expiration date — they threw it a birthday party. That humanized the milk, and as Cave explained to MIT’s alumni magazine, “We can’t throw it out just after we had a birthday party for it. That would just be rude!”

The Milk — now capitalized — became Random Hall’s unofficial mascot. Two weeks later, it won a contest on campus as one of the “ugliest” things at MIT, and earned its place of enshrinement among MIT’s many legends. For years, it sat in its original cardboard carton, but as NPR reported, that wasn’t a long-term solution. As the years passed, the Milk “ate through the cardboard carton and had to be housed in its very own biocontainment vessel,” as seen at the top (via MIT’s alumni mag), replete with a “flammable liquid” sticker, just in case.

In 2012, in celebration of the Milk’s 18th birthday, Random Hall residents filled out an application for admission to MIT (as a student, not a fridge staple) — legend has it that the Milk was deferred and then, again, forgotten about. To mark the 25th anniversary of the Milk, Boston.com spoke to those who lived with this toxic roommate, giving us the answer to the question everyone was asking: “No, no one has ever taken a sip of the Milk.” However, many have smelled it: “for a time, the plastic container that housed the carton would fill up with gas and would need to be ‘burped,’ a responsibility that would sometimes fall on the shoulders of people in Random Hall who didn’t do their dishes.”

That duty has gone away, though — because the Milk, itself, is gone. In August 2022, a new class of students moved into Random Hall, only to find that the Milk was, inexplicably, no longer there. As MIT Admissions’ blog reported on October 21, 2022 — the day after what would have been the Milk’s 28th birthday, “The Milk was declared missing on August 20th, 2022.”

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Today’s Bonus fact: If you’re a dairy farmer, you may want to give the cows names — and use those names when talking to your cows. In 2013, a pair of researchers at Newcastle University sent surveys to more than 500 such farmers, asking them various questions about how they interacted with their herds. Their results found that most of the interactions they asked about — e.g., "do they have contact with a female stockperson” as reported by ScientistLive — did not have any statistically significant effect. But one type of interaction did. The researchers discovered that “where farmers reported that they called their cows by name,” the cows produced approximately 3.5% more milk than otherwise.

From the Archives: Why Are There Random Colored Squares on My Box of Almond Milk?: It actually has little to do with milk.

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And thanks! — Dan