[Kay, I started writing this a while ago, and sadly I lost the second and third pages, so I'm sure this isn't quite where I was going before, nor is it probably as good as when I originally wrote it, since my thoughts on this are no longer fresh. My main questions are: Is this too rambly, or is it on-topic enough? And: Does the biotech part completely throw you? Is it okay in here or should that be the topic of a different article?
Thanks for reading!]
Rain falls in Toledo in drenching torrents, beating against the windshield of my boyfriend’s Taurus hard enough to render the windshield wipers useless. Water runs in the streets like a river, flowing to the already-overflowing drains. Sticks and leaves litter the roads. People swerve around them as if they’re dead deer. City-slickers, I think, settling back in the passenger seat. Where I come from, forty-mile-per-hour winds make this a common occurrence every spring.
We stop at a traffic light, and out my window I see a man standing in the rain, holding a sign. HUNGRY, the sign says. The man is tall and scrawny, with salt-and-pepper stubble lining his jaw. His bones don’t quite show, but they will if he misses too many more meals. I open my purse, but I know I don’t have any cash. Neither does my boyfriend. He used the rest of his earlier on a donation to my church, which seemed nice at the time, but now I wish he’d saved it for this man instead. It seems like a better cause.
The man occupies my thoughts while my boyfriend practices with his band, and later while we’re at Golden Corral I can’t help feeling a little disgusted with myself as I load my plate with mashed potatoes and ribs. Here I am, stuffing myself, while on a street corner somewhere in Toledo a man is starving in the rain.
Still, that’s nothing to how horrified I will feel the next day as I watch All You Can Eat Paradise on the Travel Channel. The buffets won’t bother me so much, but the fifteen pound burgers… Fifteen pounds of meat for one person, most of which will be thrown away unless that person can finish it all in four hours and lay claim to the five-hundred dollar cash prize for doing so. No wonder Americans are obese. No wonder the world hates us.
I remember Tony’s, the diner we ate at after our trip to Frankenmuth, boasting a BLT loaded with a pound of bacon. I remember how my boyfriend’s friend Jesse took away a Styrofoam carry-out container filled with nothing but his leftover bacon. I remember feeling horrified when I found out that Tony’s alone goes through 11,000 pounds of bacon per week. Now, all around me at Golden Corral, people are loading and reloading their plates with mountains of food: six different meat dishes, various carbohydrates, scads of vegetables and fruits, thirteen different kinds of desserts. I think of the contests we have here, hot-dog eating, pie-eating, God-knows-what-else-eating. I think this proves that world hunger is not due to a lack of food but rather to misdistribution. And the only good thing about that – to me, but probably not to the majority of the rest of the people in America, who don’t know about this – is that the argument for biotech crops, that they will “feed a starving world,” is total crap that can be shot down in one blow. Clearly the problem is not the amount of food in the world – Americans prove every day that there’s tons of it, more than they can eat.
(Here I picture a mother saying, “Eat your spinach! There are children starving in China, you know!”
In response, her child says, “Then send my spinach to China!”)
The hungry man plagues me through band practice, through dinner, through my thoughts of American obesity, as I finally clean my single plate of dinner, my single plate of dessert. My boyfriend says, “What? You don’t want more mashed potatoes?”
“I’m not hungry,” I say, and I watch him go back to the buffet for a third plate.
) 
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