The Lunch Machine, Part 2

By Zhenyi Tan

(This is part 2 of a two-part series. Read part 1 here.)

After the cook left the village, some villagers decided to open their own restaurants. Every morning, they all ran to the Large Lunch Machine. There, they cooked lots of food and brought it to their restaurants. When a customer came in, they simply warmed up the food again to serve it.

Soon, many new restaurants opened because it was very easy to start one. But there were only so many bellies to fill. With each new restaurant looking just like the others, the village became crowded with many similar places. The owners even started blaming each other, calling one another copycats. The market quickly turned into a messy, noisy place.

One day, a villager ate food made by the LLM and got very sick from food poisoning. Then more and more villagers became sick, and soon everyone was upset. The angry villagers went to the inventor and complained about the harmful food.

The inventor did not know what to do. He had created a machine that could cook, but he didn’t know much about cooking himself. The LLM did not know how to choose safe ingredients or prepare them correctly. He realized that the only person in the village with that knowledge was the cook who had already left the village.