How to Feed a Dictator: A Study in Terror, Chaos and Complicity

A new documentary on the chefs who cooked for some of the world's worst people premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival (I'm in it as an on-camera expert).

I have always found films to be magical creations, and among my favorite professional activities is serving as a consultant on feature and documentary films (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Joe Berlinger’s Hitler and the Nazis, and other productions). I also love to participate in films as an on-camera expert (including PBS’s The Dictator’s Playbook, Netflix’s How to Become a Tyrant, ESPN’s Berlusconi: Condemned to Win, and, now, How to Feed a Dictator).

Having written a book about film (Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema), I am always interested in how filmmakers choose to reconstruct the past, and the dynamic between the assessments of historians and the testimonies of people who experienced those histories first-hand.

This tension between external evaluation and lived experience stands out in the fascinating new documentary about the chefs who cooked for the dictators Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il. Based on the insightful book by Witold Szablowski and directed by Andrew Neel, How to Feed a Dictator is a deeply disturbing and profound film that is essential viewing.

Chaos, Terror, and Complicity

The interviews with the former chefs convey with rare precision the particular climate of terror and chaos that mercurial strongmen create, and the legacies of trauma they leave behind, along with nostalgia for the “Great Man Bringing Law and Order to the Country” persona their personality cults and retinues of sycophants ceaselessly cultivate.

The former heritage is well represented by Amin’s former personal chef, Otonde Odera, who is pictured here with his special dish of whole roasted goat, served at state dinners. Odera, who today lives in poverty, tells of being sentenced to death when one of Amin’s children developed a stomach ache after a meal; of seeing his friend executed; and how it became impossible to ignore the violence Amin unleashed on Uganda. “I missed my low wages from before,” he says in the film. “At least my heart was in peace.”

Courtesy of Andrew Neel

Such pangs of conscience don’t seem to bother Italian pizza master Ermanno Ferlanis, who cooked for Kim in North Korea, and Jorge “Coco” Pacheco, Pinochet’s personal chef.

While North Koreans starved, Kim had Ferlanis fly in prized tomatoes from Italy so he could have his favorite dish made exactly the way he wanted it. Ferlanis’s rationalizations about not seeing starvation or maltreatment are undermined by his decision to stage a desperate escape from North Korea, lest he join the afflicted due to a less than perfect pizza.

Having written about Pinochet’s regime in Strongmen, I had strong words in the film for the kind of blinders-on nostalgia exhibited by Pacheco, who continues to revere Pinochet —and today has plenty of company, with fellow Pinochet fan José Antonio Kast now the country’s president.

This film illustrates the psychological and other conditions of collaborating with tyrants and how that complicity is remembered. There is a reason dictators invest so heavily in propaganda: they hope that their whitewashed versions of history will become the norm for many long after their demise.

The actual toll of working for a dictator is made concrete with the participation of “Abu Saif,” the personal chef of Hussein, who stayed with him to the end. He appears under an alias and as a blacked-out silhouette for reasons of personal safety.

Courtesy of Andrew Neele

One of the film’s greatest strengths is that it does not let us forget about the violence dictatorships create. The masterful editing cuts between the “I never saw any violence” testimonies of many of the chefs and the information about that violence given by me, my NYU colleague Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and journalist Riccardo Orizio, who personally interviewed many of the featured dictators.

The carnage of these regimes is channeled by the blood and bodies of the animals being cooked, and by hearing about people treated like animals and slaughtered or tortured.

There are also lessons for us today about the toll of having an unstable narcissistic and fearful leader in charge of the state and the military. As I state in the film, dictators don’t only require that we betray and corrupt others. They also entice us to betray ourselves, abandoning our moral compass to work for the powerful, spreading their lies, killing their enemies, and, yes, cooking their food.