There is a rationing system for rice and corn. It's highly unlikely that this is enough food to live on, so people probably turn to the black market for food--

There is a rationing system for rice and corn. It's highly unlikely that this is enough food to live on, so people probably turn to the black market for food-- but even that is probably quite thin, and extremely expensive. Eating edible grasses/herbs (even ferns), very weak bone-based soup/tea, gutter fish, frogs, roadkill, rice roots/tubers, tree bark (the NKs have been known to make pine bark "cake"), wild mushrooms, oysters/clams (if near the ocean), wild berries/fruits, lichen, bugs, rats, wild hemp (extremely nutrient rich and unregulated in NK), and sparrows, all of which are plentiful in NK. Knowing Koreans, they probably also have family gardens where they grow garlic and shallots (relatively easy to do), provided that they can retain viable seeds. I'd imagine that these private gardens are frequently stolen from by other hungry people, so they may be clandestine a lot of the time. No kimchi, though-- they can't grow the cabbage. You see this kind of food pyramid a lot during famines-- most recently, during the Cambodian genocide but also during the Great Leap Forward in China and the Holodomor in Ukraine. Scavenging low-density calorie sources from wherever, with increasingly lowered standards for what constitutes food. The problem becomes when effectively everyone is scavenging, which leads to sparse finds and increased calorie usage during harvesting. I assume they have been in this state of extremely scarce scavengeables for years now. There's effectively no access to dairy items or fresh fruits from what I can tell. This probably results in near-endemic calcium deficiency, and is supported by their tragically reduced heights and high infant mortality. During the last NK famine in the 90s, there were widespread rumors of abduction of children for the purpose of cannibalism, and people were told not to eat meat unless they knew the source. It's tremendously sad.