I've begun to tot up the popularity of beef in restaurants - not steakhouses. And I'm finding out that the steak is the high end resto's top sale, more about this next week. What I have to find out is how good the steak is in restaurants compared to the steak in the dedicated steak houses.

In the meantime, a reader challenged my statement that beef sales declined in North America mostly because of the Beef Fat Scare of the seventies.

I quote from Statscan 2006. Cooking with beef peaked at 1976 at 23.2 kg/person. In 2006, some ground was regained, the amount of beefavailable for consumption rose from 13.6 kg per person to 13.9 kg.