What did the greatest DICTATORS feed on?

Nicolae Ceausescu, leader of the Romanian Communist Party, used to tease his foreign colleagues by always taking his food with him. And he loved stewed chicken, but the whole thing, including beak, claw and other parts. Tito, the head of Yugoslavia at the time, avoided solid food on principle and sipped his vegetable juices through a straw. At home, however, he is said to have indulged in his favourite delicacy – a good piece of hot pork.

Mao Tse-tung was a renowned carnivore and boasted about his stools. „I eat a lot and excrete a lot,“ he wrote contentedly to a friend early in his reign. Much later, however, his bowels went on strike – that was when he was visiting Stalin in the Soviet Union and there wasn’t a single toilet in all of Moscow where one could defecate squatting, as he was accustomed to.

German Vegetarian Republic
Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-tung or Benito Mussolini could not entirely afford such gluttony, as all three had digestive problems. Could this be the toll of the horrors they committed? Mussolini was diagnosed with dangerous constipation by a Nazi doctor during the Second World War.

Hitler suffered from chronic flatulence and perhaps that is why he became a vegetarian. His greaser fed him twenty-eight different drugs, one of which was an extract from the feces of Bulgarian peasants! In addition, the Führer is said to have entertained himself at dinners by introducing each time a reference to Ukrainian slaughterhouses, and by presenting everything in such a disgusting manner that his fellow diners were unable to finish.

On his board were fresh vegetables and fruit supplemented by rice and pulses. In 1942 Hitler reportedly told Goebbels that if he won the war he planned to make Germany a country of vegetarians. However, although he referred to meat as the ‚tea of the corpse‘, before the war he had debased himself over stuffed pigeon and Bavarian sausage. I don’t suppose his bad conscience bothered him then…

Fear of poisoning
Of course, dictators could not leave their fate to chance, so it was not unusual for them to employ food tasters. Hitler, for example, had a whole team of fifteen tasters. If the women survived the next 45 minutes after they had tasted the dish that was intended for the Führer, only then was the food served on Hitler’s table. Nicolae Ceausescu is said never to have travelled without his bodyguard, a high-ranking officer who was also an excellent chemist and always had a mobile food-testing laboratory with him.