Food has become a engrossing topic.

Eating habits may also be a way to understand a powerholder's psychology.

Eating habits include:

* Eats alone

* Eats in public while others watch

* Eats in silence

* Eats while demanding conversation from tablemates

*Consumes meal or picks at meal

* Are table mates free to eat as they please or must
they eat by command of the powerholder (Eg are guests forced
to over eat? Are they expected to sit hungry and watch while
the powerholder eats or refuses to eat?

* Food aversions

* Where the powerholder prefers to take meals

* With which persons the powerholder eats - or none at all

* How powerholder behaves if a meal is satisfactory/unsatisfactory

* Preparation

* Sources of foodstuffs

* Selection of foodstuffs

* Choice of persons to select, cook the food

* How the food is presented (dishes, eating utensils, table setting,
presentation rituals/routines.

* Time of day/night powerholder wants/demands food.

* Uneaten food/rejected food -- is it thrown into garbage, burned'
or are others allowed to eat

* Are meals used to humiliate others?

* How powerholder eats --

messy/neat

shares/refuses to share

active after meals or asleep

* Drunk or sober

Eating venues

* In bed

* While walking

* On toilet

* In bath or shower

* Dining room
* Kitchen
* Outdoors

*In vehicle

*(Other venue)

(Brillat Saverin in The Physiology of Taste) claimed that Napoleon commanded that his kitchen be set up so that any time he needed a meal of

chicken, cutlets, and coffee, this could 'at once be set before him'
at any time, day or night.

So, if you ever had to cook or serve dinner to a guru, sheikh, human potential
leader -- or witnessed how this was done, feel free to step up.

To toss this ball into the game, here are descriptions of
the food preferences of the ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong-un.

[www.thedailybeast.com]

(Excerpt)

Quote

The founder and former director of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, Jerrold M. Post:

Kim has this special sense of self so that there is no contradiction between the exquisite care that goes into his own cuisine and the shortly after Fujimoto’s book was published.

Post, who has also profiled Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, was struck not only by the shamelessness with which Kim craved luxury but also by his fussiness about how ordinary foods should be prepared. Not only was each grain of rice to be inspected but, according to a memoir by one of Kim’s relatives, the rice had to be prepared the old-fashioned way over a wood ?re using trees from Mount Paektu, a legendary peak the Sino-Korean border that Kim claims (falsely) as his birthplace.

Post suggested the elaborate preparation of the rice is in keeping with the ideological underpinnings of a system in which Kim and his father are treated as divine—more like the former cult of the Japanese emperor than a true communist regime.

“This is how you prepare food and water for a god. Nothing remotely imperfect should cross his lips,” said Post.

Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2015 02:37AM by corboy.

How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks

by Witold Szablowski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator)

To locate copies:

[www.bookfinder.com]


How to Feed a Dictator Spills the Beans on Five Strongmen

[www.npr.org]

[catherinezortman.substack.com]


A man of great appetites’: what’s it like to be a dictator’s personal chef?


In an often chilling new documentary, the chefs of brutal leaders from Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, talk about their unusual lives behind the scenes

Tuesday June 9 The Guardian

[www.theguardian.com]

How to Feed a Dictator review – what was on the menu for some of the world’s most evil men

Andrew Neel’s documentary contrasts the lavish dishes eaten by heads of repressive states – served by largely unrepentant staff – with the starvation faced by their citizens Guardian August August 6 2026

[www.theguardian.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/07/2026 02:15AM by corboy.

What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork

by Witold Szablowski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator)

To find copies:

[www.bookfinder.com]


Writer Witold Szab?owski Spills the Beans in the Kremlin Kitchen
By Pippa Crawford Moscow Times May 5, 2024

Quote

The book took three years to write, and spanned ten trips to Ukraine, eight to Belarus, and fifteen to pre-war Russia, where the author is no longer welcome.

The recipes range from the lavish to the stark. We learn that Tsar Nicholas’s favourite lunch was “pasta with turtle doves,” while soldiers on the Eastern front roasted snails on a spit, and that Lenin’s wife had a three-meal repertoire: scrambled eggs with one egg, two eggs, or three.

Some of book’s most moving passages include “anti-recipes” from times of famine in Ukraine and Russia. Hanna Basaraba, one of the last survivors of the Holodomor, describes how she and her family lived off weeds during the man-made famine in the 1930s.

“Now and then one of the children I played with would just disappear. They stopped coming to nursery school. Nobody ever asked what had happened – it was obvious.”

When reading the Moscow Times article, scroll down to an excerpt from Chapter 12

[www.themoscowtimes.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/07/2026 02:35AM by corboy.