June 19, 2026
Meals, monsters, and meltdown takes
How to Feed a Dictator
A creepy food doc drops, and the comments instantly turn into a fight over dictators, pizza, and bad taste
TLDR: This new documentary explores the chefs who cooked for brutal dictators and the terrifying bargains behind those meals. But commenters quickly stole the spotlight by fighting over the film’s philosophy and joking that one modern strongman’s fast-food diet is too bland for interesting cinema.
A new documentary, How to Feed a Dictator, serves up one of those premises that makes people recoil and lean in: private chefs revealing what it was like to cook for men like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and Pol Pot. The film mixes glossy food-show visuals with stories of terror, survival and moral compromise, from perfectly spaced pizza olives to a chef allegedly ordered to cook a human heart. It’s grim, bizarre, and exactly the kind of topic that sends comment sections into overdrive.
And oh, did the crowd deliver. The biggest mini-war erupted over the director’s mention of Hannah Arendt and the “banality of evil,” with one commenter flatly declaring: that’s not what Arendt meant. So while the film asks whether cooking dinner for monsters is “just business,” the community immediately started policing the philosophy homework. Classic internet.
Then came the jokes. Several commenters swerved hard into present-day dictator discourse, basically asking: where’s the segment about the guy living on McDonald’s burgers and Diet Coke? That kicked off a whole side roast, with one person dismissing him as too boring for a full episode and another saying he’s “as boring and tasteless as he is appalling.” In other words, the documentary is trying to explore the moral fog of serving power, while the comments are busy turning it into a dark snackable drama about pizza, political monsters, and whether bland taste is its own crime.
Key Points
- •*How to Feed a Dictator* is a 95-minute documentary directed by Andrew Neel and based on Witold Szabłowski’s 2020 book.
- •The film premieres at the Tribeca film festival and features five private chefs who served dictators including Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and Pol Pot.
- •The documentary examines the privileges, risks and moral compromises involved in cooking for authoritarian rulers.
- •The article highlights testimony from Charles Otonde Odera, Idi Amin’s former chef, who describes both material rewards and severe personal danger.
- •The film deliberately juxtaposes scenes of food preparation and butchery with accounts of state violence to emphasize the tension between everyday labor and political brutality.