How to Feed a Dictator is the reporter Witold Szabłowski’s account of the careers of five cooks who respectively managed the kitchens of Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot, and personally prepared the autocrats’ food. Through interviews with the cooks, Szabłowski aims to give oblique glimpses of the domestic lives of despots and convey what it is like to feed someone whose appetite can only truly be satisfied with power over life and death. Enver Hoxha’s cook Mr K remembers, “If you wanted to live, you had to take every one of his comments to heart”: Hoxha’s mere memory of French seedless grapes is enough to set the cook on a fairy-tale like quest, taking the grapes available to him and picking “the seeds out of one grape after another”.
