Director Chen Xiaoqing, the "executive chef" of the hit series "A Bite of China," has eaten a lot of strange food in his travels and so far he hasn?t been afraid of what he puts in his mouth.

But there was one Yunnan delicacy (not featured, of course) that did give the food expert pause: the juice from one of a cow's stomachs, mixed with live ants and eaten raw by the spoonful. His host slurped half the spoonful first before handing it to Chen, his guest.

So down it went.

"So far there's been nothing I'm afraid to eat," he told Shanghai Daily in an interview. "But I am getting close," he said with a laugh.

Audiences around China are hungry for details of the next mouth-watering season of "A Bite of China," the sensational documentary series about Chinese people and their stories about food. But filmmaker Chen won't say a word about the "top secret" Season 2, which is now being filmed. Everyone wants to know which foods, which regions and whose hometowns he will record in the engaging style of Western documentary storytelling that features people as much as food.

The second season of seven or eight episodes will air on CCTV Channel 1 around next year's Spring Festival. Chen heads the channel's documentary department.

Chen, a food expert whose series unleashed a "food craze," is himself almost a household name. He was a member of the documentary jury panel at the recent Shanghai International Film Festival where he spoke to Shanghai Daily.

The one clue to the next season that he did give, however, was that it would pay more attention to health issues in a country where tainted food and food safety have become a major national problem.

"The audience was quite generous for Season 1 and they weren't identifying problems about health," Chen said. "In the beginning, I agreed with Cai Lan (famous TV host, filmmaker and food critic) that delicious food starts with sacrificing a bit of health."

That view - taste before health - will apparently not permeate the second season.

"A Bite of China" premiered on CCTV1 last May at 10:40pm. Despite the less-than-ideal slot, it was hot.

"I was very surprised," Chen said.

It was not only a hit in China: It was translated into seven languages and distributed overseas.

"I think this documentary is successful overseas because it shares a common passion for people around the world, the love for food," Chen said.

What makes the documentary special is that it's not just a cooking show about regional cuisine - it's about ordinary people with remarkable stories and it pays tribute to food and culture. "The water and soil of particular place nurtures its people," Chen said.

The first episode featured a woman and her mother looking for valuable matsutake mushrooms in the mountains in Yunnan Province. To find the mushrooms they had to walk for 20 kilometers, but in the two-month harvest season they could earn 5,000 yuan (US$810).

They were all people stories, bringing a whole new angle to food that many Chinese had not seen before.

Each of the seven episodes had a theme, such as "Gifts from Nature," "The Story of Staple Foods," "Inspiration for Change," "The Taste of Time," "Secrets of the Kitchen," "A Perfect Blend of Five Flavors" and "Our Farm."

"A Bite of China" is not a typical Chinese documentary. It uses the storytelling techniques of Western documentary filmmaking used by the BBC and Discovery Channel.

"It's very obvious that we learned from foreign productions, the structure is the same," Chen said. "But most important, it emphasizes the importance of audience."

The featured ingredients and dishes were chosen on the basis of attractiveness, good taste and a good story.

After the first season, viewers excitedly talked - and argued - about which local dishes should have been featured.

"You can never satisfy the entire audience. I don't think that matters too much. Season 2 has the same issue because I'm not simply talking about food in a particular province," Chen said.

Many viewers said the production crew must have been very happy because they could taste so much amazing food. The experience was just the opposite.

"It was hard because what you capture on camera is different from the real thing," the director said. "Sometimes, in order to make it glisten, we would spread a bit oil on top, and sometimes we would not cook it thoroughly so that it would look fresher and more colorful."

To feature a dish for 15 minutes on screen, he needed around five times more footage. "There was nothing fun about it. We had to painstakingly think about how to make dishes and ingredients look better and closer to the real thing," he said.

Making documentaries

Chen, 48, is known for making "big" documentaries about social issues, history and nature. He made "Forest China" (2010) after visiting great forests for four years. Earlier he directed the TV series "Zhu De" about the legendary marshal and revolutionary leader; "Liu Shaoqi" about the president who fell out with Mao Zedong, and "China in 100 Years."

Speaking of Chinese documentaries today, Chen said the films generally lack significance and expressed concern that "if their influence is small, there will be fewer productions."

Young independent film makers want to tell the stories behind the scenes and beneath the surface, which means many subjects and films are sad and depressing, so fewer people watch them, he said.

There are two sides to the coin, he observed. "From the reality perspective, I'm definitely more inclined to their choices that are closer to the truths about society and generate some reflection about the people and the country. But the sad thing about documentary making is that if you want to succeed, it's about telling people what they want to believe, which is not so true in reality."

He cited the example of photography, saying that at one time people wanted "to show the best spirit and most beautiful moment. But sometimes this is narcissism and not true. When we really understood this approach, we found it was just a product of a photo studio and we preferred those in nature."

It's the same with documentaries, he said. "Our audiences now prefer things that are 'plastic' and 'studio-like," and most viewers don't care much about the essence and would rather see what they wish it to be."

In the future, he said, both the audience and documentary filmmaking will become more mature.