Ruby on Rails

Rather than setting the <meta name="description" contents="xyzzy"> tag in every webpage of my site, I decided to be clever and set a variable in each controller with the text and

do:

    <meta name="description" contents=<%= @desc %> /> 

on the layout instead. The problem is that the generated text has a no quotes:

    <meta name="description" contents=FOO BAR/> 

is what I end up with.

I've tried every variant of surrounding the text with quotes or using variable interpolation in strings to try to make this work.

Either I end up with no text passed into the layout, or I get 

    <meta name="description" contents=&quotFOO BAR&quot/> 

Which may actually be correct, but just looks odd.

I've actually decided to add the meta tag the old fashioned way, but now I'm curious as to why I can't make this work.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Joe