[VGSP] Butler cooking unnecessarily

You can assign them cooking tasks here so I guess that's how you would have them prepare meals. 

Did you test other butlers/lots to see if the same happens with cooking ? Any NAPs active ?

No NAPS and it happens in every household. The screenshots with food in them are two different households but it happens in them all whether they have children or not. I can easily get screenshots of the problem from every household if you want them. I got so aggravated with it that I fired the butlers in all of my households that do not have children. 

Only thread I can find on this is where the butler got stuck in a cooking loop and then starved.

Do you think they are stuck in a loop or are they doing something else in between ?

They are not stuck. They go and do other stuff like drink from my sim's globe bar, taking many baths, following my sims around to chat, running their fingers over stuff to pat themselves on the back that there is no dust, all while ignoring the spoiled food or bar drinks laying around until if and when they decide to actually do some cleaning. I would be so much less aggravated with them if they were stuck. 

And yes, you can ask them to cook meals, but you cannot direct them not to cook. In the screenshot I posted showing the butler responsibility options, you can tell them not to care for minors, not to garden, not to repair and not to clean. The option "do not cook" needs to be added as all of those are primary responsibilities and do not to cook should be there as well. That would pretty much solve everything.

Otherwise a function like "check for food", much like "check baby" (and we all know how well check baby works), would need to be implemented and it would need to check for food on the counters and in the fridge. Seems complicated and an awful lot of work to do when it would be so much easier, and make more sense, for a "do not cook" option to be available in the butler responsibilities as it should have been from the start. The fact that it is not there, and all of their other primary responsibilities are there, is surely an oversight that someone did not catch before going live in the game. While this would not technically be a bug, it is very much something that needs to be addressed.