Tomorrow (April 29) is free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s. You’re welcome.

For as long as I can remember, kind of like the cycle of cicadas, there are occasional random years when everybody gets in to ecology. New ideas emerge each time. Each time we hope for the bad ideas to go away (water-saving shower heads?) but for the good ideas to stick (like curbside recycling). But what about the good ideas that somehow got forgotten?

Think back before texting, before satellite radio, before Purell, when we were riding around in minivans, playing Duck Hunt, watching Police Academy movies. This was before carbon offsets, before hybrid cars, before An Inconvenient Truth. But a different brand of conservation was in fashion. The suburban tradition of the balloon launch was scrapped out of concern for the birds. We celebrated Earth Day in school assemblies. I remember businesses actually showing an environmental conscience. Supermarkets collected garbage bags for recycling and McDonald’s had recycling bins in its restaurants for paper and styrofoam.

In our town, convenience stores sold insulated plastic mugs for coffee. If you bought one and kept reusing it, you got a discount each time you bought coffee at the store. My mom, who was mainly a tea drinker, had one in the car. So did every other mom I knew. This was a sensible idea and eliminated disposable coffee cups.

Today, this idea has been completely forgotten. Why? Blame Starbucks. Now if you drive up to a Starbucks, you drive away with a hot drink in a paper cup with a plastic lid and a cardboard sleeve, all disposable. The flow at an espresso bar doesn’t allow a customer to hand the barista a reusable cup and have it handed back filled with coffee. It would gum up the works. Plus it would seem so… down-market! And as goes Starbucks, so goes Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, the supermarket, everywhere.

Coffee cups are a needless waste. Lately, Starbucks seems good at solving problems. They should solve this one.

Yesterday I stopped by Whole Foods to buy cereal and something for dinner and walked out $57.93 lighter. Part of this is my fault (I always get suckered into buying expensive stuff at Whole Foods like coffee beans and organic produce). But food costs are seriously high. This is absolutely not cool. As noted in this space previously, bagel prices lept up quite suddenly here in Brooklyn.

This week an AP story on food prices (”Food Costs Rising Fastest in 17 Years“) quotes none other than Steve Tarpin, the legendary Key lime pie maker of Red Hook. I have had Steve’s pies and they are outstanding. Now they cost $25!

Unlike my “book deal“, this does not appear to be an April Fools joke:

Penn State: The end of the Cosmo: A Dining Commons tradition runs its course

What was a Chicken Cosmo? It was an ordinary breaded, fried chicken patty on a sandwich. It gained a cult following in the dining commons at the university I attended because…. well, I’m not sure why, but I think the name had a lot to do with it. It sounded very space-age. “I think alumni will be more disappointed than anyone,” says the dining hall director. I guess I’m supposed to be disappointed.

Hats off to the Chicken Cosmo on its final day, today. Check out the Chicken Cosmo graphic on the Penn State Food Services web site.

My friend Renée was visiting yesterday from Indianapolis, so I took off work and we did the museum thing. We hit the Met and the Natural History Museum both in the same day, including the butterfly garden temporarily on view at Natural History. Renée is a dinosaur buff, so after seeing the dinos at Natural History we went uptown to Dinosaur BBQ for dinner with some friends.

To kill an hour between when the museum closed and when we had to be at Dinosaur, we stopped for tea at Alice’s Tea Room on W 73rd. The tea and scones were excellent, but the place takes the Alice-in-Wonderland thing a little too far. Renée called the glittery butterflies painted on the walls “too girly.”

Dinosaurs vs. butterflies: Dinosaurs win!

(Photo above: Renée Petrina)

The cost of a bagel at my neighborhood shop just went from 80 cents to $1.

Explanation? High wheat prices.

Seen here is how Domino’s Pizza is promoting its latest product – “The Brklyn,” a thin-crust pizza with pepperoni and provolone cheese. Yes, provolone. This campaign is actually running in the New York market, where we have access to the best pizza shops in the world.

Domino’s used a similar gimmick about two years ago with its stereotype-fueled “Brooklyn Style Pizza” campaign (which prompted Marty Markowitz to declare, “Domino’s is about as Brooklyn as Sara Lee Cheesecake is Junior’s”).

The concept of “Brooklyn” must be good for selling pizzas, but it doesn’t make any sense. Pizzas in New York vary from shop to shop, and some of the best shops are in Brooklyn, but there’s nothing that distinguishes Brooklyn pizza from Manhattan pizza.

Park Slope is full of very good restaurants. Most are casual places where you can dine without a reservation and still enjoy something inspired. Eating out quickly can become an expensive habit.

It doesn’t take long to discover the brunch loophole. Drop in most of these restaurants between 11 and 3 on a Saturday or Sunday and you will find an abbreviated menu with selections priced much cheaper. Just one arbitrary example: My favorite Peruvian restaurant offers a brunch special where you can get a main course, coffee and a cocktail for $10.

As a result, you can get familiar with all the best places in the neighborhood without going broke. Bonus: Socially acceptable drinking in the early afternoon!

1. Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, 646 W 131st St., Harlem. Huge, crowded, hard to get seated for dinner on the weekend, awesome.

2. Bar BQ, 689 6th Ave. (at 20th), Brooklyn. More of a bar, this place makes the list because it’s a block from my apartment and good people work there.

3. Virgil’s, 152 W. 44th St., Times Square. If you must eat in Times Square, eat here.

4. Hill Country, 30 W. 26th St. (near Broadway), Manhattan. They only have one kind of sauce, but it’s really good. Do not get suckered by the weird meat-by-the-pound ticket system.

5. Spanky’s, 127 W. 43rd St., Times Square. A suitable standby if Virgil’s is too crowded.

What’s the difference between a guilty pleasure and something that has no right to be good?

A guilty pleasure is something you can’t enjoy without also feeling bad about. It could be something you like but that’s unhealthy, or that fills you with shame. Think meat loaf. Or Meat Loaf.

But something with no right to be good starts out no ambitions to be great, but achieves greatness by accident. Since it is genuinely good, it is no cause for guilt. It’s when low art crosses into high art, or when a corporate production machine somehow blunders into something sublime. Like Rufus Wainwright recording “Hallelujah” for the movie Shrek.

Campbell’s condensed tomato soup is a great example. Somebody once told me that the paper-mill-like odor in Tacoma, Washington, (the “aroma of Tacoma”) was actually the smell of the Campbell’s tomato soup factory. I don’t think that’s true, but it seems believable enough. Campbell’s tomato soup is a marvel of food science, a recipe for gelatinous red slime that probably hasn’t changed since the 1950s. But it is the absolute apex of tomato soup, and no one has ever improved upon it. Served with a grilled cheese sandwich on a winter day, it’s the prefect lunch. Why is this stuff so wonderful? It has no right to be good!