Hail the all-American hamburger

2004-07-07 11:01

Seoul - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has introduced hamburgers, the American fast food classic, to his reclusive, communist country in a campaign to provide "quality" food to university students, a media report said on Wednesday.

The hamburgers were introduced in 2000 and dubbed "gogigyeopbbang", Korean for "double bread with meat", according to the June 29 edition of Minju Joson, an official state-run newspaper in the North.

Although reports from the isolated country have in recent years mentioned the introduction of hamburgers, the latest announcement seems to credit the country's leader for their advent.

The news marks a curious development for North Korea, where US consumerism is routinely reviled in the official media and people refer to the soft drink Coca Cola as the "cesspool water of American capitalism".

The report, carried on Wednesday by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, cites leader Kim Jong Il as saying at the time of the hamburger's introduction: "I've made up my mind to feed quality bread and French fries to university students, professors and researchers even if we are in (economic) hardship."

The government then built a hamburger plant and Kim Jong Il ordered officials to pay close attention to modernising mass production, the report was quoted as saying by Yonhap.

Hamburgers from the factory were first provided only to students at the elite Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, but were later provided to other schools, the daily said.

Hamburgers are now familiar to many North Koreans, it added.

- AP