It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hi, I'm WBEZ reporter Monica Eng.

You might not know it, but here in the U.S., we throw away about 40% of all our edible food, causing hundreds of billions of dollars

in food waste a year. But it's not just bad for the economy. It's also terrible for the environment.

For example, wasted food uses up more than 21% of our fresh water. It takes up almost 20% of our

landfill space where it belches greenhouse gases,

and it uses up energy and farmland, just to be thrown away. So a few years ago, the federal

government launched a challenge to cut our food waste in half by 2030. And that's where this

week's question comes in.

We got it from retired newspaper editor Larry Green.

He still consults and travels a lot these days,

so he's seen his share of delays at O'Hare and was curious to know.

What happened to the food that was prepared for flights that either got canceled

or were delayed several hours.

I love this question, because one bad storm, it can cancel dozens of flights, which

translates into thousands of meals, meals that have already been purchased and prepared.

So what happens to them? The answer's kind of disturbing. Before I told Larry,

I asked him for his best theory. He guessed most of these meals start frozen, and like

TV dinners, if there's a delay, they can just stay frozen. Just because of the way it comes

to you super hot on trays, on long flights. And I would imagine that

maybe some of it was donated to food banks. So frozen or donated sounds pretty logical,

especially when you think about how many hungry people could use the food. But Larry, I'm sorry

...