While Alan Guth has discovered that the Universe is the ultimate free lunch, Andrei Linde has improved this theory. He argues that the Universe is an eternal feast because all possible dishes are being served all the time. The menu offers 10^{1000} different tasty meals, previously known as the landscape.
Figure 1: The landscape, 2007 edition. For the sake of simplicity, (10^{999}-1) x 10 vacua were omitted.
It's somewhat entertaining that this evolution of the popular metaphors proposed by the two famous Gentlemen kind of mimicks the evolution of the actual discoveries within inflationary cosmology.
