[bell-cot]

> I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.

Consider how highly engineered and processed many modern foods are, to maximize their "addictiveness". Assume that the not-so-benevolent geniuses behind that trend have also put some real work into encouraging wasteful over-purchasing of their food products.

[watwut]

In the past, with less engineered supply chains, people literally kept storage of non perishable food just in case.

Just in case was either war or supply chain issue or crops issue. Just about only people who did not had that could not afford it.

Buying just right amount of food for next two days is modern behavior.

[bell-cot]

Well...

In the quite-recent past, it was common routine to buy (or harvest) huge (by current well-to-do standards) quantities food "in season", and stockpile it for consumption months later. Historically, cheese exists because it's a way to store the nutritional value of milk - when you don't have access to pasteurization, refrigeration, and modern "steady-ish milk production 365-days-per-year" dairy operations.

And similarly (quite-recent past, before the green revolution and massive farm subsidies), far more of most people's income went toward buying food. So they managed their inventories of stored food pretty carefully - vs. modern "meh, whatever, I'll just buy more" attitudes.

[Ichthypresbyter]

Mormons are still required by their religion to keep a year's supply of non-perishable food.

[inglor_cz]

This is certainly a possibility.

We waste our time on addictive social networks which are not exactly nourishing. We may be doing the same with our money on highly processed food which does not nourish us well either.