Of plastic cows and black armbands.

I was driving down Route One this morning when I noticed this sad piece of news on a roadway sign: Frank Guiffrida, founder, owner, and operator of the Hilltop Steak House, had died of a stroke on New Year's Eve at the age of 86. Hilltop, a venerable New England institution and at one time among the largest volume restaurants in the country (actually there are two of them - the one I'm familiar with in Saugus and another south of Boston in Braintree), is a feast for the senses, with its over-the-top decor and its ridiculously large portions of fresh and high-quality ingredients - especially the beef, which is butchered on the premises. I have fond memories of the place, as it was a favorite stop for me and my friends during my a capella years at M.I.T., not to mention one of my first forays into the wilds of the North Shore, which would one day become my home. On the night before my wife gave birth to our daughter we ate at Hilltop. We were going in for an induced labor the next morning and decided that since this would likely be the last decent meal we'd be eating for a while, it had might as well be a darned good one. And so it was. The best part about Hilltop by far, however, is its utter lack of pretense. Sure, there are giant plastic cows grazing under a multi-story neon cactus out front, and yes, the four dining halls are named after Wild West locales; but unlike the modern chain steakhouses, whose "themes" are as in your face as the food is bland, Hilltop is a non-nonsense oasis for wicked big people who simply love to eat.

We'll miss you, Frank.

While we're on the subject of beef, I guess we might as well discuss Mad Cow Disease, as for the first time we have a confirmed case of it here in the United States. The skinny of it is simple - if you don't know exactly where your beef is coming from, don't eat beef until they sort this whole godawful mess out. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (and its human counterpart Creutzfeldt-Jacob) is a horrible, horrible thing, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the USDA - currently presided over by former cattle ranching lobbyist - is doing as close to nothing about it as it possibly can. Right now approximately 20,000 cows or one in a thousand is inspected annually for BSE here in America, which means that for every cow that we do catch on its way to Mad Cow there could potentially be another nine hundred and ninety-nine that we don't. And being that BSE is not caused by bacteria or a virus but a malformed protein called a prion that is virtually indestructible, the modern American factory system of butchering, rendering, meatpacking, and distribution is a perfect vehicle for spreading these prions indiscriminately and anonymously throughout the so-called "food chain" of American beef consumption. So until the USDA mandates that every cow be tested for BSE - something that Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean has called for, incidentally, and a precautionary method that with new and cheaper testing techniques would only increase the price of beef by three cents per pound - be very careful out there, if you must eat beef - eat local, eat organic, eat safe. Or follow this sound (if a bit biased) advice, from the good folks at Chick-Fil-A:

p.s., by all means don't take my word alone for all of the alarmist sentiment above - if you haven't already, go read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and you'll never want to eat a hamburger again, unless you ground it yourself from a cow you knew personally. It's that bad, folks.