YOU’D think shooting a documentary about food would be a joyfully tasty trip — traveling across China, filming the creation of gourmet delights and getting to taste them. But the director of “A Bite of China” says it wasn’t much fun.
“It has been a thoroughly miserable experience,” said Chen Xiaoqing, director of “A Bite of China.” “Shooting often lasts until 2 a.m., by which time the dishes had long gone cold. Some restaurants only allowed us to film — but not taste! They said the food was too expensive!” Chen revealed.
But their hard work has been well rewarded. Chen’s latest work “A Bite of China,” a documentary series on Chinese culinary culture, is causing a stir nationwide.
The seven-episode documentary takes us on a mesmerizing tour of China’s culinary culture, introducing regional varieties and showing the hard work and profound artistry involved in making each dish.
Every day since May 14 at 10:40 p.m., CCTV-1 has seen a surge in viewers. The first in-house documentary broadcast on CCTV-1 attracted an audience 30 percent larger than that for the dramas that usually fill the station’s 10:30 p.m. time slot. On and off the Internet, there are hot discussions about the series. Some fans have confessed they stock up with food before each episode is aired, lest the seductive footage of the country’s fine foods make them drool.
According to World Journal, more than 100 million Chinese residents have watched the show.
The series has been so well received that reruns began immediately after the first show ended, and the crew is basking in stardom.
A morsel of a changing China
“We wanted to seduce you with beautiful food in order to show you what China looks like as a changing country. That was our real intention,” Chen said.
“Food has a significant status in Chinese culture. The relationship between Chinese people and food is rich, subtle and interesting,” he said.
Wang Xin, a bank worker in Beijing, said the elderly woman making bean sauce for her family in the sixth episode reminded her of her own grandmother.
“My grandparents make chili sauce for me every winter. From picking up materials to creating the finished product, it requires a lot of work and time. It is only a small can of sauce, but it is also a wonderful experience,” Wang said.
In China today, much of the younger generation works far from home. The little cans of sauce are actually a means of communication for Chinese people, she said.
The production team of about 20 people visited more than 60 locations across China in 13 months and shot more than 80 kinds of food for the seven episodes.
Zhang and his team established a single criterion to choose subjects from the vast array of food and ingredients in China — the food they showed must typify the spirit of the Chinese people.
In Zhang’s episode “A Taste of Time,” an elderly woman in Hong Kong who used to make shrimp sauce with her husband has been making the sauce alone since her husband died. “Here, her life and emotions are linked with the sauce. The food is not just food anymore.”
“Instead of famous chefs and famous dishes, we chose to shoot ordinary working people and their daily meals,” Chen said.
“As the footage shows, cities have become very similar, the only difference left now is the food cooked in these concrete jungles and the smells of food in the air,” he said.
Chen said the way the country is changing is also a theme of the documentary.
“We show the traditional ways of cooking and let people know that some of the people cooking are the last generation to cook this way. Their children have moved to big cities, and their parents’ craft will be lost in the mists of time,” he said.
Chen admitted the team is planning a new season of the documentary. “We didn’t cover all the provinces. We didn’t do Shandong, Henan, or Jiangxi. We will probably make a new season that covers those.”
Taking a big bite
Netizens have described the documentary as “a disaster for people who are trying to lose weight.”
The program boosted online food orders when it aired, and orders for previously unpopular local specialties peaked after these foods appeared in the documentary, said a spokesman for Taobao.com, China’s largest consumer-to-consumer trade Web site.
During the week the series first aired, 7.44 million searches were made on Taobao for foods and ingredients shown in the series, and more than 8.9 million people bought over 10 million local food items on the Web site, up 12.5 percent from previous months, the spokesman said.
“We did not want to limit our audience to foodies, but tried to attract ordinary people. We tried our best to film the food in a seductive way,” Chen said.
Meanwhile, on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service, the documentary trended for its entire debut week.
Netizens even imitated the name and created new topics like “A Bite of Qinghua University” to discuss the food in university cafeterias, as well as “A Bite of Sichuan,” which focused on local provincial foods.
For anybody who loves food and loves life, it seems one “bite of China” is never enough.
(SD-Agencies)
What people are saying
Huozheneba:
The rooftop vineyard in the last episode reminds me of the grape vine trellis that my grandpa set up when I was little; the grapes were green and there were big fuzzy worms on them. It reminds me of a dog grandpa had raised, and the goldfish in the huge water jar… No trace of my childhood can be found in today’s Beijing. I can only look into my own memories…”
HM Yaojianchi:
Living in the city, I didn’t even know that the most common-looking foodstuffs are collected in such [hard and] mysterious ways. What an eye opener! A lot of people now say that things are better in foreign countries, but really, China is the most profound country of all!”
However, “A Bite of China” also serves as a reminder of China’s many food safety issues.
ieamd:
When the sun shines through reality, yesterday’s delicacy becomes today’s chemistry lesson.
DJ Dazyuba Wangpeng:
“A Bite of China” has already become “China on the Blade.”
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