Posted by Ilya Somin:
Communism Provides Pizza for the Masses - Or at Least the Communist Party Elite:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_15-2009_03_21.shtml#1237327477
North Korea may have [1]the most oppressive government on earth, and
[2]its people may be starving as a result of horrendous communist
policies. But they are surely happy to know that their Dear Leader Kim
Jong Il [3]has thoughtfully provided "authentic" Italian pizza for a
few of his most privileged subjects:
It has taken almost 10 years of work, but North Korea has acquired
the technology to launch a project very dear to its leader's heart
- the nation's first "authentic" Italian pizzeria.
The launch of Pyongyang's first Italian restaurant meanwhile brings
to fruition a ten-year effort by Kim Jong-il - a renowned gourmand
and lover of western food - to create the perfect pizza and pasta
in his homeland.
Last year a delegation of local chefs was sent by Kim to Naples and
Rome to learn the proper Italian techniques after their homegrown
efforts to mimic Italian cuisine were found by Kim to contain
"errors".
In the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to
North Korea to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a
luxury which is now being offered to a tiny elite able to afford
such luxuries in a country that cannot feed many of its 24 million
inhabitants.
Although the news story isn't clear on this point, I suspect that the
access to the Pyongyang Italian pizzeria is limited to those with
special privileged status given by the government, as was standard for
stores providing unusual goods in most communist societies.
On the upside, Kim Jong Il's plan to provide pizza for the toiling
masses of North Korea seems to have worked out better than [4]his
earlier plan to alleviate food shortages by breeding imported giant
rabbits, which was aborted when [5]the greedy Dear Leader decided to
eat the initial batch of rabbits himself.
References
1.
http://civilliberty.about.com/od/internationalhumanrights/p/northkorea101.htm
2. http://www.seattlepi.com/national/149996_northkoreaweb26.html
3.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/4999429/North-Korea-launches-perfect-Italian-pizza.html
4. http://volokh.com/posts/1171255468.shtml
5. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_04_08-2007_04_14.shtml#1176261263
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