How to Feed a Dictator makes chefs reveal the real cost of “just cooking”

A new documentary is serving something far less comforting than a dinner party: five private chefs recount what it was like to cook for dictators, where every meal doubled as a stage for power. The film, How to Feed a Dictator, premieres at the Tribeca film festival this week, and it centers on the unsettling idea that “normal” choices can become high-risk decisions when the world you operate in is a dictatorship.

Director Andrew Neel frames the shock as more than spectacle. “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” Neel says, pointing to how familiar, beloved things like food can take on an entirely different dimension under dictatorship. That’s the thesis you feel in your stomach: the chefs are not only telling stories about pepperoni pizza, fish barbecues, and a reportedly entire roasted goat. They are exposing the mechanisms of survival that sit underneath the utensils.

The documentary’s appetite list is vivid, but the stakes are the point. Kim Jong-il is depicted as a fan of pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein is described as unable to resist a fish barbecue. Idi Amin is reportedly capable of consuming an entire roasted goat. The menus may differ, but the appetite is treated as the same. For history’s most notorious strongmen, the dining table was not a break from politics. It was an extension of control.

And that matters even if you are not in the business of feeding anyone remotely powerful. In every industry, from security to hospitality to private equity, the core question is similar: when your job touches power, what exactly do you become? A chef has an intimate role, literally inside the private space where leaders signal status, comfort, and control. The film, based on the 2020 book by the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, uses that intimacy to probe the “fraught terrain between morality and survival.” It asks viewers to consider the choices these chefs made, and the choices they never really had.

Structurally, the documentary reads like a tasting menu. It is built to deliver sobering morsels of human atrocity within the trappings of a decadent cooking show. That contrast is not accidental. A cooking show typically relaxes you. Here, the relaxation is the trap. Watching the food context while hearing about dictators forces a cognitive mismatch, which makes the whole thing especially uneasy viewing on an empty stomach. That framing does something important for decision-makers: it shows how environments can normalize the unacceptable, then dress it up as routine.

There is also a second-order lesson around incentives and accountability. In an authoritarian system, the normal feedback loops that tell an employee what is safe, ethical, or compliant do not function the same way. The source emphasizes the ever-present dangers that came with the job. That is the reality behind the film’s moral question: not “Would you be brave?” but “What happens when the cost of refusal is not abstract?” In corporate life, refusals can cost promotions, contracts, or reputation. In dictatorship, the film suggests that the cost can be existential. The point is that organizational design and power concentration determine the shape of “choice.”

For boards and executives, this connects to a broader theme: how risk becomes cultural. When a role is tightly controlled and information is asymmetrical, the people closest to the action may be the least able to verify what they are enabling. That is not a legal argument, but it is a governance warning. The documentary’s central setup, anchored by Neel’s Arendt reference, is that everyday actions can accumulate into something monstrous. You do not need the same political system for the same failure mode to appear. You just need incentives that reward compliance without accountability.

Finally, there is a strategic stakes angle for anyone leading teams that intersect with high-risk partners. How to Feed a Dictator premieres this week at Tribeca, and it is based on a book by Witold Szabłowski, turning reported lived experience into a public narrative. Even if your organization operates under modern rule of law, this kind of story reinforces why ethics programs cannot be “poster-first.” They have to be operational. When you are asked to make something happen inside someone else’s power structure, the line between service and complicity can blur fast.

If you run a company, advise investors, or sit on a board, the question the film raises is uncomfortable because it is universal: when the appetite of power meets the skills of ordinary people, who sets the rules, and who gets hurt when those rules are missing? The chefs in the film show that the dining table is not neutral. It’s a control surface. And once you see that, it is hard to unsee it.