The book “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” has the same story. When the defector reached South Korea, he spent days just wandering in the grocery stores.
We have a lot of foreign students here. The Africans like to bitch (yeah I said that) about how much Americans waste food. I finally responded “We got it to waste”. People who live in countries that purposefully starve their citizens don’t get to lecture me on how we live.
A friend of mine from Sweden visited in winter and was amazed at the selection of vegetables available. He lived in an upscale suburb of Stockholm and still couldn’t get lettuce and other perishables.
I was in Prague in Nov. ‘72 and the banana had arrived. All the street vendors had bananas for a few days, then none.