One surefire way to tell when people at the office are swamped is when they start breaking out the Lean Cuisines and Hot Pockets for lunch. Stress levels are high when our candy bin starts running low. It’s understandable and we all go there from time to time.

Last night we saw “What’s on Your Plate?” a documentary at the Hammer Museum that made us step back and think about those occasional unhealthy lunches. The documentary follows two eleven-year-old girls in New York City as they explore and question food activists, farmers, storekeepers, and their families about processed food everywhere, from markets to school cafeterias. One of the girls, Sadie, has a family history of high cholesterol, which she overcomes throughout their discoveries about food from government-subsidized farms versus small, locally grown farms.

The documentary hammers home the point that if we care about our health and the small farms that grow local, fresh food, we need to shop at Farmers Markets or order produce from organizations like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – which some of us at Hello do.

There are a good number of organic restaurants nearby that serve locally grown food, such as X’otik Kitchen and the Green Truck that’s only a phone call away. Every Tuesday there’s a Farmers Market in downtown Culver City. We enjoy the great produce and food selections there, but when projects pile up the visits to the Farmers Market dwindle. The film was a good reminder to be more mindful of what we put on our plate as well as the importance of local Farmers Markets – they provide healthy, natural food from local sources and promote community interaction, of which L.A. could always use more.

Flux kicked off its third annual screening series at the Hammer Museum last night, where we went to see OK Go’s elaborate music video “This Too Shall Pass,” as well as the other excellent short films offered.

Rhiannon Evans’s stop motion animated short, “Heart Strings,” charmed us with a very human love story between two rag dolls. In L’Ogre’s “Hold Your Horses – 70 Million,” band members reconstructed famous paintings in a hilariously witty performance. The program ended with OK Go’s music video. We appreciated the meticulous hard work and talent required to shoot the video. Eighty-five takes and 89 setups is no easy feat, not to mention the coordination and timing required for syncing the people, music, and machine together. The video has reached almost 10 million views on YouTube, but it was a different experience to watch it on the big screen.