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The DC Environmental Film Festival started this week, continuing through March 28, and its theme this year focuses on the many connections between food, agriculture and the environment.

Still from "Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home," a 2009 documentary about farming.

I’m faced with some tough decisions: many of these sound fascinating, but it’s not physically possible for me to make it to all of the screenings. Here’s hoping Netflix will have a few of these titles eventually….

1. Fresh (USA, 2009, 72 min.) This showed last night, sorry—I missed it, too! But this documentary is making the rounds nationwide; find a schedule here or even host your own screening. It features farmers, activists and businesspeople who are “re-inventing our food system” with an eye to both sustainability and practicality.

2. Terra Madre (Italy, 2009, 78 min) Ermanno Olmi’s documentary combines reportage about the international Slow Food movement with lyrical images of farmers and their environment. Screening at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 18 (tonight!) at the E Street Cinema, tickets are $10.

3. The following four films will be shown consecutively in a free screening on Saturday, March 20, in the National Museum of Natural History’s Baird Auditorium:

12:30 p.m.: Dirt! The Movie (USA, 2009, 90 min.), a documentary about why soil is so important to all life, narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis.

2 p.m.: Ladies of the Land (USA, 2007, 30 min.), a profile of four women farmers, in recognition of the growing proportion of women in American agriculture.

2:45 p.m.: Soil in Good Heart (USA, 2008, 14 min), about the literal earth we depend on to grow food. This is a preview of a longer film in progress by Deborah Koons Garcia, whose “The Future of Food” (2004) is also worth watching.

3 p.m.: Seed Hunter (Australia, 2008, 59 min.) spans several continents chasing scientist Ken Street, a “real-life Indiana Jones” (though I think Nikolay Vavilov would be a more impressive comparison) as he collects seeds from hardy, drought-resistant indigenous crop species that could help humanity cope with climate change.

4. The following three films will be shown in a free screening on Sunday, March 21, in the National Museum of Natural History’s Baird Auditorium:

Noon: Homegrown (USA, 2009, 52 min.) How one California family lives and farms “off the grid” in an urban environment.

1 p.m.: Ingredients (USA, 2007, 66 min.) Traces the birth and progress of the local, sustainable foods movement in America.

2:15 p.m. Honey for the Maya (US, 2009, 8 min.) The ancient Mayan art of keeping stingless bees.

5.  Lunch (USA, 2010, 25 min) looks at the links between nutrition and learning, through the lens of Baltimore’s public school cafeterias. Larry Engel’s Potato Heads (USA, 2010, 30 min) explores the history of the potato while tying into larger agricultural issues. Free screening of both films at American University’s Wechsler theater at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 22.

6. Nora! (USA, 2009, 30 min) celebrates chef and farmers’ market champion Nora Pouillon, whose namesake DC eatery was the nation’s first certified organic restaurant. Free 7 p.m. screening on Tuesday, March 23 at International Student House, followed by discussion with Nora Pouillon.

7. Seeds of Hunger (USA, 2009, 52 min) A primer on the political, environmental and social challenges of achieving food security as the global population climbs. Free screening at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24 at the World Bank, RSVP required.

8. Harvest of Shame (USA, 1960, 55 min) The National Archives revisits CBS television broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s powerful investigative report about the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States. Free screening 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24, followed by discussion with Bob Edwards.

9. E2 Transport: Food Miles (USA, 2008, 30 min), narrated by Brad Pitt, addresses the problems of a fossil-fuel driven food transportation system and highlights solutions. Next up, The Great Food Revolution: 24 Hours, 24 Million Meals (Canada, 2009, 45 min) uses the microcosm of New York City to illustrate the “complex choreography” of food distribution. Free screening of both films at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 25 at the Maret School.

11. Our Daily Bread (Austria, 2005, 92 min) describes itself as “pure, meticulous and high-end film experience that enables the audience to form their own ideas” about the systems at the heart of industrial food production. Free screening at 7:30 p.m. on March 25 at the Embassy of Austria. Reservations are required.

12. Food Fight (USA, 2008, 73 min). Christopher Taylor’s documentary about the corporatization of the American food system in the 20th century, and the growth of alternative local-sustainable-organic foods movement. Free screening at noon on Friday, March 26 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library.

13. Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home (USA, 2009, 78 min). A film that “explores the awakening conscience of several people who grew up in traditional farming culture and who have now come to question the basic premises” of their way of life.  Free screening at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, March 27 at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Movie award season kicked off recently with the Golden Globes, and continued Saturday night with the SAG awards, and Meryl Streep already added another trophy to her case. She won best actress in a musical or comedy for her comedic (and, you might say musical, considering her sing-song voice) portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia.

Of course, the real star of that movie is food, and the joy of both cooking and eating it. Its scenes of culinary victory and defeat, pleasure and horror, join a long line of classic movie food moments. I scoured my memory—and that of Smithsonian staffer and cinephile, Erik Washam—for other great food scenes on film. Here are a few I think merit  a Food & Think “FaTty” Award:

Outstanding Use of Magical Food
Like Water for Chocolate: In the Mexican movie based on Laura Esquivel’s novel, Tita expresses her forbidden love for Pedro through a dish of quail with rose petals (recipe adapted here) that sends everyone at the table, especially Tita’s sister Gertrudis, into a sensual frenzy that ends with Gertrudis galloping away, nude, on the back of a soldier’s horse.

Chocolat: Same title ingredient, different country. This time, Juliette Binoche shows some uptight French villagers how to enjoy life with her charmed confections, which have peculiar effects on those who eat them.

Best Food Fight
Animal House: This one’s a no-brainer. By which I mean both that it is an obvious choice for the category, with its famous cafeteria food-fight scene featuring John Belushi squirting mashed potatoes from his cheeks, and that it is not exactly cerebral. But a classic nonetheless.
The Public Enemy: James Cagney’s character proves he’s a dirty rat when he smashes a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. The scene caused quite a stir when the film was released in 1931.

Of course, we have to give an honorary FaTty to silent-film director Mark Sennett, whose Keystone Cops movies popularized the pie-in-the-face gag.

Best Use of Food as Personality Signifier
The Breakfast Club: You don’t need to know anything more about the five characters in this classic 1980s high-school flick by John Hughes than what they eat for lunch. They are a jock (a bag of chips, chocolate cookies, three sandwiches, milk, a banana and an apple), a nerd (soup, PB&J with the crust cut off and apple juice), a criminal (nothing), a princess (sushi, which was considered très chic at the time), and a basket case (a Pixy Stix and Cap’n Crunch sandwich).

Best Ordering Scene
Five Easy Pieces:  A young Jack Nicholson gives voice to dissatisfied customers everywhere when he tells his unaccommodating waitress, who has informed him he can’t have a side order of toast with his breakfast, to bring him a chicken salad sandwich on toasted bread, hold the chicken, mayonnaise and lettuce.
Runner-up: If the waitress above is an example of poor customer service, Sally (Meg Ryan) in When Harry Met Sally is the other side of the coin. Her fussy and complicated order, with multiple contingencies, drove Harry nuts (and, in true romantic comedy form, became one of the things he grew to love about her).

Outstanding Performance by a Crustacean
Amy Adams in Julie & Julia wasn’t the first actress to wrestle onscreen with a lobster. Thirty years earlier, Diane Keaton and Woody Allen had to wrangle a whole kitchen full of escapees, in Annie Hall.

Best Use of Egg Consumption to Establish Character’s Virility
This one is a toss-up. Which is manlier: gobbling down 50 hard-boiled eggs in a row, as Paul Newman did in Cool Hand Luke, or slurping down raw eggs before a training run, as Sylvester Stallone did in Rocky? I don’t know, but both scenes make me queasy.

Most Poignant Demonstration of Passion for Cooking
Big Night: Brothers Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Stanley Tucci) try to revive their failing restaurant with a sumptuous feast. You’ll be rooting for them to succeed, and wishing you could reach into your television to taste the timpano.

I could easily keep going, but I’ll hand it over to you readers (who proved very creative with your contributions to the food lessons in children’s books comments). What are your favorite movie food moments?

The housing market is still in the tank in many parts of the country, but only if you fail to take into account the gingerbread sector, where things have really been picking up lately.

For Exhibit A, look no further than the White House, where pastry chef Bill Yosses constructed a 400-plus-pound replica of the presidential abode out of gingerbread, marzipan and white chocolate. Another D.C. landmark, the Smithsonian Castle, got a similar treatment (with a mere 100 pounds of gingerbread and 50 pounds of icing) from Charles Froke, a Four Seasons pastry chef. Click here to see a video about this feat of confectionary construction on our sister blog, Around the Mall.

S.F. Weekly compiled a list of the most elaborate gingerbread houses in the country. Aside from the White House, it showcased several competition entries, and a couple of life-size versions—including one at a hotel at Disney World in Florida that took 400 hours to bake, 160 hours to decorate, and has its own bake shop inside.

Impressive, but personally, I find the classic Hansel-and-Gretel-style cottage covered with swirls of icing and gumdrop accents to be far more charming. In real-estate speak, they have curb appeal. King Arthur Flour has a helpful online instruction booklet for constructing the basic sugar dream home—one that’s reassuringly within nearly everyone’s reach and can’t be foreclosed (it is susceptible to natural disasters, however, especially of the sweet-toothed-child variety).

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the White House, the cutest version of the gingerbread house has got to be these miniature ones by Not Martha, meant to be hung on the side of a mug of hot chocolate. Adorable.

My vote for most creative gingerbread house goes to the Australian food blogger (via the Atlantic Food Channel) who devised a replica of a cave from the set of the movie Where the Wild Things Are. Constructing a sphere from tiny gingerbread bricks turned out to be more of a project than the blogger had anticipated, but even the half-finished structure looked pretty cool. I applaud the effort. He includes instructions for those who dare to attempt a similar feat.

If you’re the type who wants your pastry construction to be structurally sound enough to meet the local building code, check out the tool suggestions from This Old House. Rarely does the home chef find a need for a band saw or a Dremel rotary tool, but, as the article points out, how else are you going to carve an iceberg out of sugar?

Slice of Cream Pie with Cherry (or ‘Piece of Boston Cream Pie’), 1964; Woodcut, Artist’s Proof; image: 8-3/8 x 8-3/4 in. (21.3 x 22.2 cm); sheet: 13-5/8 x 11 in. (34.6 x 27.9 cm); Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. Paul Beckman, P.1967.08.1; © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena has a small exhibition of works on paper by an artist I like, Wayne Thiebaud, which I visited during my trip to Southern California. (The show ends today.)

I first encountered Thiebaud’s work as an art student in San Francisco in the late 1980s. He is best known for his oil paintings of cakes, pies and other sweets, which share a sugary pastel palette and luscious brush strokes that resemble frosting. On a purely visual level, they are appealing for the same reasons their subject matter is: they look delicious.

But, as the black-and-white prints in the show reveal, there’s more to Thiebaud’s work than eye candy. Look at the woodcut print to the right, ”Slice of Cream Pie with Cherry (or ‘Piece of Boston Cream Pie’),” from 1964. With a few spare shapes, he conveys an instantly recognizable image. And it still looks delicious, because your mind fills in the information it already knows: the silky texture of the cream, the contrasting flavor of the cherry on top. As the exhibition curators wrote, “We cannot separate it from the general notion of the cream pie; looking at the pie, we know exactly what it would taste like, even though we have not sampled the unique slice that sits before us.”

Similarly to the other Pop artists of his time (such as Andy Warhol with his soup cans), with whom he’s often grouped, Thiebaud was exploring iconic cultural (and particularly American) images, as well as “the tension between uniformity and individuality.” The idea of the production line is echoed in his use of printmaking, in which many copies of the same image can be reproduced. Many of his pieces, both paintings and prints, show rows of pastries—sometimes a variety of cakes, sometimes near-identical slices side by side. As the artist said of his work, in 1968, “Why must pie always be cut so precisely? Why not just scoop out a helping with a spoon? … And you can see a pie in Pasadena, or Madison Avenue, in New York, or Madison, Wisconsin, and it’s the same damn pie.”

Thiebaud was born in 1920 and grew up mostly in Southern California. As a young man he worked in a cafe, whose rows of pie slices in the display case he has cited as an influence on his choice of subject matter. In his early career he worked as a cartoonist and designer, and served as an artist in the United States Army during World War II. Although he had his first solo exhibition in Sacramento in 1951, he gained national critical attention with a 1962 show at the Alan Stone Gallery in New York City. In 2001, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Thiebaud’s work, prompting Michael Kimmelman to write in the New York Times, “If the world were a perfect place, the Wayne Thiebaud retrospective that has just opened at the Whitney Museum would be nailed to the walls for good and we would be free to stop by whenever we needed to remind ourselves what happiness feels like.”

I may not like the taste of Red Bull, but I’ve got to give them props for clever marketing. The first (and only) time I’ve ever tasted their energy drink was in a very unexpected place—on my favorite hiking trail the mountains of northern Vermont, a few years ago. I’ve been there hundreds of times in my life, and it’s usually fairly deserted, so imagine my surprise when a guy decked out in Red Bull gear suddenly appeared in front of me.

“Need some energy?” he asked. Before I could answer (actually, I was stunned speechless), he pulled a can out of the soft-sided cooler slung around his neck, thrust it into my hand with a perky smile, and hiked on down the trail.

Since caffeine can be dehydrating, it’s pretty much the last thing I want to drink while exercising. I finally cracked open the can when I got back to my car a few hours later…and after a few sips, decided it was pretty much the last thing I wanted to drink under any circumstances. (To be fair, it probably tastes better cold, and I don’t like soda anyway, so I was a tough sell.) I prefer my caffeine in the form of a good cappuccino.

Last night, I got another taste of the company’s marketing genius when I stopped by the opening reception for Red Bull’s “Art of Can” exhibition at DC’s Union Station. They’d managed to transform the train station’s main hall into a nightclub-like environment, complete with multiple bars, colored spotlights, a DJ and a gaggle of young women in miniskirts and logoed shirts (whose main purpose appeared to be asking guests, “Are you having fun?”).

The art exhibit consisted of 56 pieces by artists in the United States and a dozen other countries, in media that ranged from sculpture to paint to glassblowing. The only requirement of the contest was for artists to “utilize the blue-and-silver can literally or simply as inspiration,” according to the catalog. Most of the pieces involved actual cans, cut and shaped into other forms: A knight, a parrot; a rescue dog; a skull; a shark; a hula dancer; a ball cap; and of course, several bulls. Weirdly, two artists both decided to shape the cans into cigarette boxes (at least one of them understood the irony, titling the piece: “One Addiction Deserves Another”).

I felt sad for the 25-year-old student who used the cans to build a cute little faux-robot with a bouquet of flowers in his hand and a “love meter” on his chest. The plaque by the work stated that she “was inspired by the idea of having a boyfriend who genuinely cares about her.”

And I couldn’t help but chuckle at the passive-aggressive tone in the statement accompanying another piece, which featured stuffed bulls with wings, dangling from some sort of musical mobile. This was apparently the artist’s response to a critic’s negative review of his entry in an previous “Art of Can” exhibition. The artist “may not have a lot of formal training,” the statement explained, “but at least he can appreciate a work of art that someone took the time to make.”

I left feeling impressed with the artists’ hard work and creativity, and secretly proud of myself for avoiding the actual product the event was intended to sell. And then I opened the “press kit,” which was packaged in a cardboard tube… darn it, I should have known!

The “Art of Can” exhibit will be on display at Union Station, free and open to the public, through October 19.