North Koreans are eating grass, but Kim Jong-il titillates his palate with expensive delicacies...

In 2003 a Japanese sushi chef bearing the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto penned a memoir that gave rise to the expression 'cook and tell’. The subject of Fujimoto’s indiscretion was Kim Jong-il, for whom he had served as personal chef for more than a decade. The rotund North Korean leader had greater passion for good food than for beautiful women, allowing his chef as intimate an understanding of his psyche as any of his many purported mistresses, though none of them – as far as I know – ever wrote a memoir.

Money was no object when it came to food. Fujimoto made shopping trips around the world to pick up ingredients – to Iran and Uzbekistan for caviar, to Denmark for pork, to Thailand for mangoes, durians and papayas. On a whim, Kim once sent Fujimoto to pick up a box of his favourite rice cakes, which were scented with mugwort and available only at a department store in Tokyo. Fujimoto later evaluated the trip and put the cost of each bite-size morsel at $120.

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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. Each grain of rice had to be inspected, and, according to a memoir by one of Kim’s relatives, the rice had to be prepared the old-fashioned way over a wood fire using trees from Mount Paektu, a legendary peak straddling 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,’ Post said. Full story...

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