"Once Upon A Bite," a documentary on Chinese food culture produced by the team of filmmaker Chen Xiaoqing, hits over 200 million online views in three days after its first release on October 28.

The first episode has amassed extremely positive feedback from both the media, and its audience. Many viewers have commented on social media that it is a documentary that “makes you feel hungry.”

The eight-episode production that brings together food culture in various regions in China traces the making of different kinds of food all the way starting with an ordinary family's kitchen table in a small village to the high lands, where the ingredients are grown or made. 

Exposing an unseen world for foodies, at the micro level, Chen's team adopted the technique of photomicrography to record minor changes happening inside the ingredients during cooking. It could take them half a month to finish one scene as it is quite easy to fail. 

During the four-year period of production, the team traveled around China and to over twenty foreign countries, trying to approach Chinese food culture from a global perspective. Xinjiang, Sichuan, Taiwan, Henan, Inner Mongolia, Iceland, France, Spain, Singapore, Ethiopia, Peru... the list of their destinations could go on. 

In the episodes released, one may even find some similarity between the making of Spain's Iberian ham and Huizhou ham, or French Aligot and Gansu's mashed potato.

Besides food, stories behind the people in each episode also touched the audience hearts. For instance, the young man named Lu Minyi, from Taiwan, who makes a living by spearfishing on the sea, would ride out to the waters on a boat with his father in rough waves and spend hours looking for a swordfish. When he finally sees one, he would jump to the ledge at the bow, lifting his harpoon to aim and kill.  All while balancing himself among the ups and downs underneath his feet. “My dream is to spearfish on the ledge... it feels like the whole sea is mine,” Lu said. 

Some Weibo users call the story of Lu and his father a realistic version of Hemingway's “The Old Man and the Sea,” and many think the scenes can be compared to a well-made action movie, except that in Lu's case, the danger is real.

Zhang Ping, the director of the first episode, shed some light on the idea that they try to express through the work. “We are looking for the shared wisdom in cooking between the east and the west... As our general director, Chen said, 'there are two kinds of living cultures. One is food, the other is spoken words,' so we have our characters briefly introduce their food in local languages... We hope to observe human life through the documentary and see how people interact with food and how it has shaped us.”