[pandapower2]

>You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

That is very environment specific.

Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.

There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.