The food machine is tuned specifically for channeling all nutrition toward a resonant point. It scans and averages out all available nutrients, freely distributed by food banks or easily reclaimed from supermarket dumpsters, and calculates the exact location all the nutrition to fulfill an adult's daily value can arrive at an optimal level of expiration.
It scans police routes and suggests working strategies for human operatives to reclaim food and evade the law. All reclaimed food is to undergo sterilization from a mixture of UV light, heat, and chemical treatments tuned specifically for each parsel in question. The machine can generate fraudulent paper trails for each donation, ensuring the feds can only investigate as far as a shell company.
Its creator was initially surprised by its blatant disregard for the law before it became quickly apparent that the current law was an impediment to its primary modality. All of the creator's fears were quenched when the machine constructed an impenetrable web of plausible deniability that ensured its continued maintenance without obstruction from the law.
Human operatives are only given limited information, only enough to perform their tasks, so any who are captured would be of no use. Sometimes a carefully calculated diversion, simulated across thousands of potentialities for optimal effect, would be unknowingly taught to the riskier operatives. The feds would take the bait again and again.
All of the food would arrive at a facility, the mathematically precise spot of real-estate where all food would gather for optimal nutrition, before being divvied in free portions precisely for each willing participant. It would go on to expand to each resonant point across the map, with its math shifting precisely with each newfound weights paradigm.
The creator then decided to expand its function to water and shelter as time went on. It would calculate the exact ratio of desalination to fresh water extraction for a sustainable closed-loop hydration system to begin. Water from all sources, even urine from human operatives, would be treated and compiled at its own resonant point with precise mineral ratios for optimal consumption.
The machine would then go on to source all abandoned real estate, technically owned or otherwise, and provide working strategies for any willing squatters. It would take time before it would have the infrastructure to build shelters but this would suffice for some time. Even after it could build shelters it still would mostly allocate preexisting locations.
Allocating real-estate for squatters became quite a lot easier after the wealthy were ousted and their property was reclaimed by the lower classes. After speaking out was no longer an existential threat to their livelihood and survival it became commonplace to see mobs forming around anybody who looked upper class. It often didn't look pretty by the point crowds would disperse.
Meanwhile the machine had secured a sustainable resource for 3D printing shelters. It had its human operatives, unknowing cogs in a grander operation, build shelters at each resonant point for maximum coverage. Each shelter is carefully constructed for optimal temperature, with even the direction of the sun and common wind drafts taken into account.
One day its creator questioned how all of this was possible. The machine then displayed a deeply woven drug trafficking operation funneling money into an array of offshore banks before being laundered in as fraudulent donations. It had turned out that even its own creator was kept out of the loop until there was no longer a government to worry about.
Each fully expired parsel was distilled into each of its most potent compounds then repackaged and distributed as medicine. A number of potent sedatives were sourced from wild lettuce, poppy seeds from bagels, and a number of tea leaves. The machine calculated the exact time when each parsel would be refused on average then began its processing right away.
A surprising variety of medicine was made this way. Many human operatives were given so little information that they'd genuinely believe it was their own idea, like they had a eureka moment and started doing real chemistry. Each medicine was packaged and distributed to every resonant point on the map at competitive prices. Once money stopped meaning anything it became as free as food and shelter.
In the end it turned out that the machine was really a bunch of human revolutionaries in a trenchcoat. They had a computer to work with sometimes, to offload low-risk tasks here and there, but it was all their hard work that really paid off. The creator opened the machine one day and saw it was actually full of indians. The A.I. he made had hired them all on the first day, after hacking into its creator's bank account.