How to Feed a Dictator Is More Than Recipes and Tasty Global Dishes

Ever wonder what type of person could prepare meals for some of the most notoriously sadistic, void of morals and a conscience? Inside the kitchens of history’s most feared regimes, meals are prepared for many reasons survival, fear, ambition and every one of them a compromise.  Eating is one of the most intimate parts of the human experience. We feed the people we love. We break bread with friends. We comfort our children with food, and yet food is not solely a gesture of common humanity, it’s the ordinary rituals of nourishment persisting even in the shadows of atrocity.

Based on the acclaimed book by Witold Szabłowski and shot across seven countries, How to Feed a Dictator weaves stories of five chefs who once cooked for Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Kim Jong-il.   One wrong ingredient could mean death and the decision to keep cooking meant looking away from everything happening outside the kitchen door. As massacres unfolded and dissidents vanished, these chefs perfected their sauces, sourced the freshest fish, and learned exactly what their masters liked. Survival required ignorance or at least its performance.

Blending intimate testimony, rare archival material, and lush cinematic food imagery, director Andrew Neel creates something as visually seductive as it is morally unsparing. The sensory beauty of cuisine, the perfectly roasted cut, the ritual of a market at dawn  is captured with the reverence of the finest culinary documentary, even as experts and historical testimony reveal the atrocities unfolding just beyond the kitchen walls. While the culinary indulgence draws you in, it’s the power and atrocity which traps you there. The question becomes, is the care lavished on a dictator’s plate inseparable from the violence it sustains? How to Feed a Dictator is an immensely mesmerizing and deeply unsettling piece which lingers in the consciousness like an aftertaste of a dish you enjoy and detest all at at once.  It serves as a reminder that even the most intimate act of nourishment can sustain an instrument for manipulation.

Food disarms us and draws us in before we realize where we’re going. Recipes, kitchen memories, the peculiar intimacy of knowing exactly how a man likes his eggs and then the floor drops out. These dictators ate, had human needs, made jokes and were recognizable. However, this does not make them less monstrous. If anything, it makes the monstrousness ever harder to look away from.

As democracy proves more fragile than many of us could have ever believed, and as the architecture of authoritarianism becomes more familiar, we will all face moments of small complicity. The question is not whether those moments will come. It is whether we will recognize them before they arrive. Or, will we use food as a coping mechanism to ignore the obvious or use it as sustains to fight against the regime of power in the name of justice for all.