"A Bite of China" fills viewers' hearts and stomaches

A documentary series combining human interest elements with foods from across China captured the country's hearts and stomaches for the entire first week that it aired.

On May 14, the documentary series "A Bite of China," produced by China Central Television (CCTV), debuted, kicking off a week-long surge in viewership for CCTV-1 during the 10:30 p.m. time slot.

The series has stirred heated discussions both on- and offline, and episodes have been watched over 20 million times online and attracted an unexpectedly high TV audience.

"The food, cooked by the most ordinary people in the remote corners of China, reminds me of my hometown, my mum's cooking, and my childhood," said 28-year-old Wang Xin, one of the hundreds of thousands of viewers moved by the documentary.

"It made me homesick. I cannot help but shed tears," said Wang, who is originally from northwest China's Shaanxi province but currently works at a bank in Beijing.

"No matter how far you go, no matter who you become, your stomach will still be your hometown stomach," said Chen Xiaoqing, the director of the documentary as well as a famous food writer in China.

As a nation of food lovers, audiences were initially drawn to the series by the good-looking food, but were later impressed by the human element.

"We are trying to tell people about the real China. It is about food but not only food," Chen said.

The seven-episode documentary weaves together stories of ordinary Chinese people and the diversity of their food and cooking methods, with each episode focusing on a particular food-related topic, including ingredients, staple foods, how one ingredient could be used to make many different dishes, storage, preparation, flavor and how local ecology effects local food.

The first in-house documentary broadcast on CCTV-1, the series attracted an audience 30 percent larger than that for the TV dramas that usually fill the station's 10:30 p.m. time slot, said Liu Wen, the producer of the documentary as well as the head of the documentary channel CCTV-9, which is airing the series from May 22-29.

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 around the time that 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 website.

During the week the series first aired, 7.44 million searches were performed 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 website, up 12.5 percent from previous months, the spokesman said.

"We did not want to limit our audience to foodies, but tried to seduce any normal human being with 5,000 taste buds on his or her tongue. We tried our best to shoot the food in a seductive way," Chen said.

Meanwhile, on Sina Weibo, China's most popular Twitter-like service, the documentary trended for its entire debut week.

Netizens even imitated the name and created new topics like "A Bite of Tsinghua University" to discuss the food in university cafeterias, as well as "A Bite of Sichuan," which focused on local provincial foods.

A MORSEL OF A CHANGING CHINA

"We wanted to seduce you with beautiful food in order to tell you what China looks like as a changing country. That was our real intention," Chen said.

"Food has a significant position in Chinese culture. The relationship between Chinese people and food is rich, subtle and interesting," he said.

Wang Xin, the 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, they need a lot of work and time. It is only a small can of sauce, but it is also love and memories," Wang told Xinhua.

In China today, much of the younger generation works far from their hometowns. The little cans of sauce are actually a means of communication for Chinese people, she said.

"In delicious food, there lives the Chinese people's sensibilities," said Zhang Minghuan, the director of the fourth episode.

The production team of about 20 people visited more than 60 places 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 carry 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 makes the sauce alone, as her husband has died. "Here, her life and emotions are linked to 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 among the steel forests 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 who cook this way. Their children have moved to big cities and left just photos in the home, and their crafts will be lost in the river of history," he said.