It's worth stating that this is the MailingListsController and there is no mention of a MailingList. It seems to me like some functionality in the "before" example could live in the MailingList class.
We just started using steak and it is slowly replacing cucumber in our application.
We found the translation between English -> Step Definitions -> Ruby to be too onerous, especially after our stakeholders showed no interest in helping write the scenarios...