Ever since Al Gore made An Inconvenient Truth, it feels like every day is Earth Day. We’ve been better about recycling, have tested out the green lifestyle, and think a little more about where our food comes from.

Just in time for today’s celebration of the planet, the Bon Appetit Management Company has developed the Low Carbon Diet Calculator to make it easier to eat green.

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Persephone, the recently opened Michael Leviton restaurant in Fort Point Channel, puts its eco-friendly values at the center of its sales pitch. “None of our fish is from further away than the Chesapeake Bay,” the restaurant’s website reads, “and our beef, lamb, and veal all come from New England or Southern Canadian farms.”

I love to see this kind of commitment in a restaurant. It takes time and effort to piece together a local network of distributors, rather than simply ordering from a mega-distributor. And there are so many good reasons to do it: the quality and freshness of the product, the opportunity to support local farmers, the reduced environmental impact. Isn’t it better for the environment, after all, to buy ingredients from nearby farms, given that the makings of the average American dinner must be trucked about 1500 miles from their source to your table, according to a 2001 Iowa State University study?

Well, it’s not quite so simple, as an interesting story on CNN.com today points out.

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