They're not. This is another consistently manufactured impression - that the famine never ended.
They were starving in the 90s but it wasn't like that was deliberate and it ended 25 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
There's a number of ways the media continues to manufacture this impression, including:
* Interviews with people who fled North Korea a long time ago - closer to the famine.
* Paying North Koreans they can gain access to for good stories - at which point they get some really juicy stories. A small number of these apart under the weight of their own contradictions - the rest, of course, can't ever be verified.
* Looking at satellite photos and drawing dubious conclusions (like if there isn't food being imported from China this month that they don't have food).
* Looking at trailing indicators of the famine like stunted height.
* Comparing everything to South Korea - which has really good metrics even by first world standards - rather than, say, an average middle income or 3rd world country.
It's a manufactured impression.
Western oligarchy controlled media doesnt like to talk about how they pay $0 for college and medical care. They focus exclusively on the prison camps, etc.
Contrariwise Im pretty sure that North Koreans are surprisingly well educated about what went down in Guantanamo bay, Abu ghraib, medical bankruptcies in America and the cost of college.