Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones. This week was a banger for blue skies and highs in the 70s. Also, I didn’t get a single mosquito bite while weeding in our backyard yesterday. Sorry if that jinxes it.

Last edition was all about how living in walkable / transit-friendly cities means you’re being sustainable and healthy just by existing (congrats). This week, we’re talking about good, cheap food.

Many years ago, I was willing to sleep on the ground, wear the same underwear for a month, and carry a 50-pound backpack full of gear and cheese. Full lunar cycles of sanity have since passed, which means I can look back fondly at a time when I didn’t have a dairy allergy and didn’t absolutely require the nightly sensation of slipping into crisp linen sheets.

The biggest backpacking trip I took was in high school, where I spent the summer hiking in the Yukon Territory and trying to avoid grizzly bears. Besides the out-of-this-world scenery, what I mainly remember is how hungry we all were. I would fall asleep dreaming of Cheez-Its.

The best piece of advice I got from a trip leader early into our expedition was “Eat your best meal every night,” which essentially meant don’t hoard everything for later, and don’t waste anything either. It also meant getting extremely creative, especially the closer you got to re-ration day — instant mashed potatoes with ramen noodles, peanut butter with ramen noodles, wild blueberries with ramen noodles. And cheese with everything.

As the days passed, our packs would gradually get lighter and we would get hungrier and even more creative. Spoonfuls of jelly? Sure. The noodle that just fell in the dirt? Mine. Licking the wrapper of someone else’s Snickers bar? Absolutely.

And then a couple times during the trip, the most miraculous thing would happen. We would trek to an unnamed lake in an unnamed valley and watch the sky. You’d hear the good news before you saw it. The light rumble of a propeller. Then, a float plane would appear from behind the peaks, curve toward us, make a daredevil splash landing, and start unloading massive blocks of cheddar cheese and grape nuts (god help us).

In return, we would hand the pilot our old candy bar wrappers (thoroughly licked) and empty cheese bags. Pretty much nothing but actual plastic went back on that plane, and if the pilot hadn’t shown up we probably would have just gone ahead and eaten the bags too.

So the first solution here is to send everyone on a NOLS trip to the Yukon. Let them eat grape nut raclette for a few weeks.

The second thing I’ll say is that food waste is a multifaceted issue that involves farming practices, grocery stores, restaurants, schools and offices, and of course people like me who dutifully put leftovers in Tupperware and then never touch them again. (See how far I’ve fallen since the Yukon?)

Reducing the amount of food that goes into landfills is a big problem to solve, but it’s super important because, among other things, all that wasted food adds up to about $1,500 lost for the average American family, according to the Dep of Agriculture.

Dads across America are making a huge impact by saying “are you going to eat that? pass it here” to their kids every night, but there are also a lot of organizations and brands working to make things better too. One of them is Flashfood, which as of August 2025 now operates in Kroger stores around Richmond, VA.

A few weeks ago I went to their launch party in Carytown, and then did a little Hot Bones experiment by trying the free service for myself.

The free app shows users food deals up to 50% off at their local grocery stores (Kroger for us in VA) for fresh produce, meat, bakery items, and other good stuff. You pick what you want on your phone, and then you go pick those things up at the store where they’re patiently waiting for you. Pretty cool, pretty streamlined.

Before I got in the car to drive to Richmond for the launch party, I downloaded the app and purchased a bag of fresh dinner rolls and an entire apple strudel. The total cost was $4.19. Both items were 50% off because their best-by date was that same day, and if some hero like me hadn’t purchased them, they’d likely end up at the Richmond Southside Transfer Station. Also Kroger wouldn’t have made any money on the items either.

So win for the customer, win for the grocer, and win for the planet.

The process was super simple for me, and although a lot of the items at the Carytown Kroger were meat-based when I checked the app (a whole organic chicken with giblets would have been tough for the unrefrigerated car-ride home), there were also quite a few veggie and bread-based options. And that apple strudel of course.

The girl who went to the Yukon, used rocks as toilet paper, and prayed to the Cheese Plane would not have batted an eye at something so piddly as a “best-by” date. But those calluses have worn off, overtaken by a rule-abidding mentality and an irrational fear of moldy food.

Generally speaking, my current understanding is that when food reaches any sort of expiration date, it just explodes. So Flashfood’s model of connecting users with food that’s close to going bad but not yet bad is conceptually awesome to me, but in practice harder to swallow.

With so much confusion around what food dates actually mean, I was curious about how other customers felt about the app. So after the Carytown event, I asked Esther, Flashfood’s VP of Comms, a few questions about the process.

On whether customers are scared off by the best-by threshold: “We certainly see chatter around it. … What we’ll typically say is, ‘it’s close to its best-by date — it’s not past its best-by date.’”

“There’s a lot of confusion around what the date on the package means: There’s a ‘best-by,’ there’s a ‘sell-by,’ there's an expiration, and for the most part, those are all reflections of quality and not safety.” [There is only one product in the US that has federally regulated date labels: infant formula. Everything else is up to the manufacturer.]

“What we say is, generally, this food is perfectly good to eat. … Use your own discretion [because] at the end of the day, you’re the one who’s going to be eating it, and you want to enjoy it, but we don’t tend to see people scrolling away from the platform or the concept really.”

Plus: “The freezer is an incredible food waste prevention tool. You can freeze pretty much everything. Produce, [meats], lots of cheeses.”

“There are consumers who know that if you buy meat prior to its listed best-by date, then you freeze it, it extends its life by months, if not more than that.”

On how we used to handle food vibes: “We used to live in a world where our senses determined whether we wanted to continue eating a product or not. And some people still kind of ride or die by that. I think we've joked a lot about people [who] identify as a ‘sniff test family’ or not. And if you grew up in a sniff test household, that’s probably the rule you continue to live by.”

Translation: If the yogurt smells weird, don’t eat it. If it smells fine, go for it. If you’re backpacking in the Yukon, enjoy it before the grizzlies do.

On how ultra-processed food further messes with the equation: “I remember we did this experiment in middle school where we took four different slices of bread, [put] each one in a plastic bag, and we watched their lifespan. It was unprocessed whole wheat, processed whole wheat, unprocessed white, and processed white.”

“It happened as you would predict: The whole wheat unprocessed was the first one to get mold, then the white unprocessed. The slice of Wonder Bread lasted for several semesters.”

“The Ziploc bag disintegrated before the bread got mold on it. All of us were blown away. It was a crazy, crazy experiment.”

“Yes, that food did not ‘go bad.’ I’m sure it was past whatever date was listed on the packaging, but the food visually never changed, which is terrifying. … So that’s a whole other layer to this — the preservative thing. It’s like, okay, just because this item has a technically longer lifespan, what does that mean for the ingredients that are in it and the ingredients I’m then consuming?”

The brand has saved shoppers more than $355 million on groceries since launching, it saved me $4 just on my test run, and if I had bought that whole gibleted chicken I would have saved another six bucks.

Esther also promised to let me know when they start opening up in grocery stores closer to Cville.

Results from last week’s poll: It’s officially fall when …

Big fan of biographies, but often I find they’re either about interesting people and not written well, or written well but not about interesting people.

This rec does not follow that pattern. Dirtbag Billionaire is written by the extremely smart NY Times reporter David Gelles, who also wrote a book on Jack Welch — the former CEO of General Electric who prioritized profits over literally everything else (you may know him as Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock).

Chouinard is essentially the opposite: a crusty climber, unorthodox businessman who built Patagonia into a Baggies powerhouse, enduring philanthropist, and a billionaire … at least until a few years ago.

In Gelles’ words, “As the rest of the business world was swept away in the rush to maximize shareholder value, here was a founder, and a company, swimming upstream.”

Full disclosure, I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’m really enjoying it so far. Would definitely recommend.

Bonus: If you’re DC-based or like road trips, Gelles is speaking at Politics & Prose next Thursday at 7pm

🍅 Meal of the week: VegFest is back this Sunday, so I highly recommend not eating all weekend to save up for this one. (There is a vegan pie eating contest.) More info on vendors, schedule, live music, and yoga here.

🐶 Pet of the week: Sleepy Sal! If you need a hound dog to take perfect Saturday afternoon naps with you, this is your guy (6 years, 44 lbs, perfect brown & white spots).

🔥 You get a brand new heating & cooling system, and you get a brand new heating & cooling system: In addition to Charlottesville’s new energy efficiency grants (including $1k off a heat pump), new incentives just dropped that’ll top you up with another $2k. The catch is that there’s only room for 20 installs, so don’t let your annoying neighbor beat you to it.

Pro tip ^ email Rosina from the Energy Resource Hub ([email protected]) to talk to a real human about what that could look like for your home setup.

👟 Sorry to be the one to tell you this: But your old running shoes stink. Bring them to Ragged Mountain Running and they’ll help recycle them for you. Bonus: This month, for every pair of recycled sneakers, $1 goes directly to Cville Community Bikes to help get more bikes to kids and families.

🏡 Cool house of the week: 1920s gem with historic charm, upstairs laundry, and a window under the kitchen sink (3 beds, 2 baths, $385k in downtown Staunton)

💼 Job of the week: Part-time mechanic at Cville Community Bikes (5-25 hrs/week, $16-18/hour and 30% employee discount)

💰 Not a local job, but too good not to share: Program Director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($500,000 - $600,000, not a typo, based in CA)

Have an event or rec you’d like to share? Hiring? Interested in advertising?

Share any and all info here.