Suleika Jaouad

On the TED Radio Hour, don't you hate it when leftover cilantro rots in your fridge?

I have to tell you, cilantro is like my nemesis.

Food waste expert Dana Gunders says that's just a hint of a massive global problem.

Food waste has about five times the greenhouse gas footprint of the entire aviation industry.

Ideas about wasting less food.

That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Listen and subscribe to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

It was the spring of 2011, and as they like to say in commencement speeches, I was getting ready to enter the real world.

I had recently graduated from college and moved to Paris to start my first job.

My dream was to become a war correspondent, but the real world that I found took me into a really different kind of conflict zone.

At 22 years old, I was diagnosed with leukemia.

The doctors told me and my parents point-blank that I had about a 35 percent chance of long-term survival.

I couldn't wrap my head around what that prognosis meant, but I understood that the reality and the life I'd imagined for myself had shattered.

Overnight, I lost my job, my apartment, my independence, and I became patient number 5624.

Over the next four years of chemo, a clinical trial and a bone marrow transplant, the hospital became my home, my bed, the place I lived 24-7.

Since it was unlikely that I'd ever get better, I had to accept my new reality.

And I adapted.

I became fluent in medicalese, made friends with a group of other young cancer patients, built a vast collection of neon wigs and learned to use my rolling IV pole as a skateboard.

I even achieved my dream of becoming a war correspondent, although not in the way I'd expected.

It started with a blog reporting from the front lines of my hospital bed, and it morphed into a column I wrote for The New York Times called Life Interrupted.