So insistent is Kim on eating the best of everything that he sends trusted couriers on shopping missions around the world. His sushi-chef-turned-author, who writes under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, revealed that he made trips to Iran and Uzbekistan to buy caviar, to Denmark to buy pork, to western China to buy grapes and to Thailand for mangos and papayas.
Once, on a whim, Kim sent him to Tokyo to pick up a particular herb-scented rice cake. Fujimoto calculated that each bite-size cake ended up costing about $120.
Former North Korean diplomats who were stationed abroad have told South Korean intelligence that they were asked to send each country's delicacies to Pyongyang for Kim's consumption -- among them such exotic items as camel's feet, said a South Korean biographer, Sohn Kwang Joo.
Other world leaders have exhibited distinctive eating habits -- Bill Clinton was mocked for his junk-food addiction, and 300-pound former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany wrote a cookbook -- but few have been known to be as fussy as Kim.
Kim insists that his rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mt. Paektu, a legendary peak on the Chinese border, according to a memoir written by a nephew of Kim's first wife. He has his own private source of spring water. Female workers inspect each grain of rice to ensure that they meet the leader's standards. (The nephew, Lee Young Nam, who defected to South Korea in the 1980s, was assassinated by suspected North Korean agents in Seoul in 1997.)
Kim's refined palate is not merely a matter of idle gossip, but the subject of serious study by political psychologists trying to understand the North Korean leadership.
Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist who founded and was the longtime director of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, says Kim's obsession with eating the best food comes from being the son of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, revered by the propaganda machine as a god-like figure. Post diagnosed the younger Kim as a malign narcissist in large part based on information about his eating habits.
"This is how you prepare food and water for a god. Nothing remotely imperfect should cross his lips. He has this special sense of self so that there is no contradiction between the exquisite care that goes into his own cuisine and the fact that half his population is starving," said Post, who also has profiled such figures as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
