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What do dictators like to eat?
You are what you eat - but also how you eat and who you eat with. Food can affect your mood, your bowels and your world-view, write Victoria Clark and Melissa Scott, authors of Dictators' Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants.
As many dictators aged they grew more and more obsessed with the purity of what they ate.
North Korea's Kim Il-sung had all his rice grains individually selected and created an institute whose sole purpose was to devise ways of prolonging his life.
The Romanian Communist party boss Nicolae Ceausescu irritated foreign leaders he visited by bringing all his food with him.Tito, head of the neighbouring state of Yugoslavia, was shocked by his insistence on drinking raw vegetable juice through a straw, avoiding all.
Tito loved nothing so much as a slice of warm pig fat, while Ceausescu - when at home - had a weakness for a stew made with a whole chicken… feet, beak and all.
Portugal's piously Catholic Antonio Salazar loved the sardines that reminded him of his impoverished childhood. He recalled having to share a single sardine with a sibling.
Hitler's chronic flatulence may have accounted for his becoming a vegetarian and to his allowing a quack doctor named Theodore Morrell to dose him with as many 28 different medicines, including one made of extract of Bulgarian peasants' faeces.
Food tasters were inevitably de rigueur and highly valued among the cruellest and most paranoid of our subjects.
Hitler had a team of 15 female food-tasters on hand throughout the war years - nothing was delivered to his table until the girls had survived for 45 minutes after eating.
Saddam Hussein's delinquent son Uday was beaten up and hurled into jail for the crime of killing one of his father's tasters.
Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu never travelled without a high-ranking Securitate officer, who was also a chemist, equipped with a mobile food-testing laboratory.
Ultimately, of course, all the food-tasters, chemists, faddiness and fussiness in the world could not save these men. They all died in the end - and many died violently.
BBC News - What do dictators like to eat?
You are what you eat - but also how you eat and who you eat with. Food can affect your mood, your bowels and your world-view, write Victoria Clark and Melissa Scott, authors of Dictators' Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants.
As many dictators aged they grew more and more obsessed with the purity of what they ate.
North Korea's Kim Il-sung had all his rice grains individually selected and created an institute whose sole purpose was to devise ways of prolonging his life.
The Romanian Communist party boss Nicolae Ceausescu irritated foreign leaders he visited by bringing all his food with him.Tito, head of the neighbouring state of Yugoslavia, was shocked by his insistence on drinking raw vegetable juice through a straw, avoiding all.
Tito loved nothing so much as a slice of warm pig fat, while Ceausescu - when at home - had a weakness for a stew made with a whole chicken… feet, beak and all.
Portugal's piously Catholic Antonio Salazar loved the sardines that reminded him of his impoverished childhood. He recalled having to share a single sardine with a sibling.
Hitler's chronic flatulence may have accounted for his becoming a vegetarian and to his allowing a quack doctor named Theodore Morrell to dose him with as many 28 different medicines, including one made of extract of Bulgarian peasants' faeces.
Food tasters were inevitably de rigueur and highly valued among the cruellest and most paranoid of our subjects.
Hitler had a team of 15 female food-tasters on hand throughout the war years - nothing was delivered to his table until the girls had survived for 45 minutes after eating.
Saddam Hussein's delinquent son Uday was beaten up and hurled into jail for the crime of killing one of his father's tasters.
Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu never travelled without a high-ranking Securitate officer, who was also a chemist, equipped with a mobile food-testing laboratory.
Ultimately, of course, all the food-tasters, chemists, faddiness and fussiness in the world could not save these men. They all died in the end - and many died violently.
BBC News - What do dictators like to eat?
