A Bite of China

When the Chinese documentary series A Bite of China debuted in 2012, its bucolic scenes of mushroom gathering, mud fishing, and family reunions sparked something deep in the Chinese psyche. The food safety crises of the past decade were still fresh in the mind, along with the idea of urbanization robbing the country of its rich food heritage. In short, the series was a runaway hit, and has become a cultural mainstay.

A Bite of China is a seven-part documentary series about making and eating all kinds of Chinese food, including Hong Kong and even Taiwanese food. It introduces the history of food and the story behind different kinds of food. Chen Xiaoqing is the director.

The series looks at the evolution of a variety of food in different districts, the Chinese food culture, the relationship between food, and seasonal evolution of Chinese food. Compared with the first season, there are more plots about laborers’ lives and their feelings, and you find they are so simple and unadorned.

The most impressive part to me is the fourth one, about the daily life of a family and the basic food they eat daily. Behind the food, there is a strong sense of family, traditional etiquette and even the culture. In fact, the food even comforts the whole family. This part told me that homemade food is the most delicious. In China, the traditional food is the most valuable and irreplaceable.and the nearby lakes become thick bogs covered in webs of detritus. Men come in little boats, perhaps 100 a day, paddling their way across the sinking river in the dim, blue-grey light before sunrise. They’re looking for lotus root, the starchy staple that is a highlight of much Asian cooking, and gives a sweetish solidity to a winter soup.

I’d never given a thought to where lotus root comes from. Getting hold of it turns out to be fantastically difficult, dirty and dangerous. The roots, perhaps a metre or two long, lie deep in the thick, gluey mud of the lake bed. They’re fragile, and snap or scratch easily, and there’s no machinery to get them out. You wade out into the bog, the mud coming up to your knees, and find a root, work out which direction it’s lying in, then dig it out slowly and carefully by hand. At the end of another 14-hour day, the workers compare their aches, torn muscles, sprained ankles and twisted ligaments like soldiers or a rugby team. They hope for particularly nasty winters, which mean that more people make lotus-root soup, and the price of their product rises.

This is just one segment of the best TV show I’ve ever seen about food. I’d hazard it’s the best one ever made. A Bite of China began airing in May on the state broadcaster there. CCTV is better known for its obliging communist propaganda and unwatchable soap operas than for anything this sumptuous and beautiful. Thirty of the country’s most respected filmmakers worked for more than a year filming the seven 50-minute episodes. They shot throughout the country, from the frozen lakes of the north-east and the bamboo forests of Liuzhou to the frenetic chaoses of Beijing and Hong Kong.

As always, the people are the most interesting part: an old woman looking for matsutake mushrooms on pathless mountainsides (starts at 0.52), a family making kimchi in the Kingan mountains (1.54), a fisherman catching barracuda for his supper, a Shanghai woman filling her bathtub with live crabs to make drunken crab (31.10), drowning the creatures in wine and storing them in earthenware. But though the programme explains that the lives of many of its subjects are difficult and that the people are poor, it stunningly captures ways of life that are evaporating in modern China.

Each episode adopts a theme: preserving by salt, pickling or wind, staple foods, the “gifts of nature” or “our rural heritage”. The filmmakers explore the central idea using examples from across the country. Perspective shifts from the macro – helicopter shots of neon cities or canopied mountains rearing out of lakes – to the micro – a single bamboo shoot pushing through the earth.

There are plans to screen A Bite of China in 20 countries including Germany and the USA, but the show is only available on YouTube at the moment. The amateur translation can be a bit ropey. (Elderly people enjoying food: “Even though their tastebuds are in degeneration phase, they still remember their hometown deliciousness.”) And there’s some irony in the fact that YouTube itself is banned in China.

But what I love most about the programme is that it never patronises its subjects or viewers. It takes for granted the fact that what it has to show is worth watching, and devotes itself instead to making the final cut look as ravishing as possible. It’s not, strictly speaking, a cookery programme, though we see a lot of people cooking and there’s a recipe book tie-in (currently available only in Chinese). Instead it’s educational in a more traditional, Reithian sense. It’s perhaps the food TV equivalent of The Ascent of Man or Lord Clark’s Civilisation or the best of Attenborough.

British food TV has had its moments, but has never attempted anything like this. And it’s impossible, having watched a couple of episodes of A Bite of China, not to feel a little humbled or even ashamed when you turn to your own country’s food TV output and find Sophie Dahl and the Hairy Bikers.