Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones.

Last week was all about the health benefits of food-scanning apps like Yuka (when they’re not recommending I switch to grape nuts). A lot of you wrote in to say you liked the app, so here are two other cool ones to check out: Flashfood and Too Good To Go. These set you up to snag groceries and pastries for up to half price and prevent food waste in the process. (Nearly 40% of food is wasted in the US.)

As for the poll, about 40% of you guessed correctly, nicely done. Wegmans chicken broth scored a 94/100 with Yuka’s rating, with Barilla’s spaghetti coming in a close second with a solid A minus. See below for this week’s poll 🫡

I’m so sorry — I’m doing that thing where someone puts in their headphones and I keep asking them questions — but just a quick heads up before we get started that Hot Bones will be off next week for naps, unnecessarily competitive games of gin rummy, and pie. Ok you’re good to put your headphones back in and press play!

—

So my parents got a dog during Covid, and she’s a really sweet lab with big eyes named Nixie (like the water sprite, not the president). But every time they go on vacation and I’m set to dog sit, Nixie believes that, as of that moment, her sole responsibility is to ruin my life. 

Dog sitting 2024 was, to be fair, not actually Nixie’s fault this time. 

I picked her up from a kennel nearby to take over the second leg of dog sitting. As the woman behind the desk handed me the tightrope leash with a wild hound on the end of it, she mentioned, “Nixie had a little upset stomach this morning.” And then we left and everything was my problem.

Most of us have some sort of pet-related horror story, moments when we walk downstairs on our way to an early morning meeting only to find a pile of cat vomit soaking into the carpet, or a corporate picnic set down in company lore because of the young associate whose dog found a dirty diaper in the woods. 

Mine was the morning after I picked Nixie up from the kennel. She didn’t make a peep all night, but when I got up and went into the mudroom to let her out, I discovered why they call it a mudroom. 

I’ll let your imagination run some laps on what the scene looked like, but here are a few key details: This particular room is full of lots of unlit cubby holes to put your shoes and gloves and unread mail in — and the walls are white — and the floor has these nice grooves in the tile that on a hot summer day feel good under your bare feet. And everything that was once clean and good was now in question.

Nixie the poor dog was in misery and I knew my first step was to a) not make any missteps and b) let her out of the house. But beyond that, I had no idea where to start. How do you begin to clean this up, when the walls are a Jackson Pollock study in umber, the floor is lava, and the entire room feels like an inside out doggy bag. 

So I didn’t do anything.

I closed the door, I took Nixie down to the river to at least get her clean, and I tried not to cry about what I’d have to dive into. Do I start with the walls? The cubbies? The floor? The dog bed? Why must all dogs seek out the deepest, darkest nooks to do what needs to be done? 

It was a long walk. And then I grabbed 4 rolls of paper towels and all the Fantastic spray I could find in the house and just started cleaning right at the doorway. Like, in the grooves of the doorframe. It took me two business days to clean everything. And I still won’t walk barefoot in the mudroom 6 months later.

The only person who’s been more ready to leave after taking care of Salley family members was my grandmother, who in 1999 stood at the bottom of our front steps with all three suitcases zipped and buckled as my parents stepped out of a taxi after a month-long trip. Behind her stood a kid with a massive bullseye of ringworm on her forearm (me) and another kid who was about to fail out of fourth grade (my brother).

In 2024, I stood in the driveway with my duffle packed, ready for one hug and the ceremonial passing of the leash as my parents pulled in. (Nixie being 100% fine by this point just so you know). 

I think we’re going to take 2025 off from dog sitting.

→ Because if you took your dog to this spot between May and June 2024, you may be entitled to join a class action lawsuit for intestinal pain and suffering! Payout is looking like $1.35.

→ But also because in many ways that feeling of “where on earth to start?” is also how I felt before I really got into the climate space — seeing that there were some really shitty climate change problems to deal with and no footholds for where to begin, let alone which of my own actions really mattered the most to clean things up. 

As in, I could spend all day using Q-tips to clean each and every groove of tile, but then I might pull back the dog bed and find a true monster in that corner.

Since then, one of the best resources I’ve found is a bird’s eye view of the most powerful personal climate actions we can take.

When I first saw this, I was surprised to learn that how and what I eat had the biggest ROI for helping the planet. Food production, it turns out, is responsible for one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. And incidentally, eating more plant-based food and not wasting what’s on our plates are also great for our health and wallets. 

Here are a few ways to put this into practice:

All in all, these 20 individual and household-level actions could reduce up to 25% of future greenhouse gasses. That’s pretty cool and it doesn't mean companies + governments should be left off the hook. Instead, I find this is a helpful reminder that we actually do have some agency in helping put solutions into place.

Lists like these are one-size-fits-all, and we are not. Project Drawdown, the climate advocacy org that created the list above, recently revised its recommendations given the different ways we all live our lives. 

A helpful way to think about your impact on the planet is in 4 buckets: 

If you’re interested, you can get the full deets on how to take stock of your footprint and act on it here. 

+1: There’s also an argument to be made about crock-pot actions — where you can set it and forget it, like installing a heat pump hot water heater — versus actions you have to decide on every day — like saying no to bacon and yes to cinnamon raisin oatmeal every morning. You might want to autopilot your next big sustainable change, or you may wish for the holier than thou tingle you get when grocery shopping for chickpeas every Sunday. Dealer’s choice.