Jan 12, 2015 | KIM (SQUARED)
North Korea: Big Shrooms Means Big Bucks
Aside from orphanages, North Korean unintentionally whimsical leader Kim Jong-un, also has a knack for visiting booming state-of-the-art commercial facilities like the spanking new Pyongyang City Mushroom Farm he dropped by a couple of days ago. Mushrooms are his second best pizza topping after Emmental cheese so this was a delightful outing for Kim.
In fact, he was so impressed with the facility that he urged "all provinces, cities and counties" to build their own. A robust mushroom production on a national level can after all have several benefits. For one, it can transform the country into an agricultural powerhouse to rival other worldwide exporters like the tulip-obsessed Dutch and the soya-bean-savvy USA. With the right kind of promotion mushrooms can even be the new super food, God knows the country's propaganda machine is a world class PR institution; promoting mushroom-mania along with USA-bashing would be a piece of kale.
Furthermore, an increased production of this staple food may stop North Koreans dropping dead from hunger (inconveniently on the streets quite often). Plus, you can never have too many mushrooms, as that old Korean saying goes (although some western scholars have translated it as "you can never have too much mass jail rooms").
Kim, in his inherited wisdom, also advised potential mushroom collectives to carefully select for cultivation those mushroom species that can thrive in local climate, in order to avert past commercial endeavors that did not fair that well. In hindsight for example that tropical fresh fruit idea wasn't all that worked out (apparently you need tropical weather amongst other things); the unicorn chops & ribs venture was also a notorious flop (who would have thought that unicorns would be so reluctant to mate); and who can forget the calamitous business of the Arctic seal-skin accessory business?