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.