I would say more that humans have evolved to be very interested in status (as stated in the text you quoted) and that wasting resources is high on the list of how to show your high status. Status used to be critical to survival when being kick out of the tribe was basically a death sentence. Tim Urban wrote a good article about this[1] with some good ideas to ponder about the value of caring about what other people think about you.
„Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept.“
James Damore will be eager to know more about this theory.
Yeah in a world where people are known to commit suicide because of rejection from their peers, in a world where people die homeless on the streets of the richest cities due to rejection from their peers, I would strongly disagree that social survival is no longer a real concept.
I think of Arby's "ITS THE MEAT!" campaign to make it appear manly by slamming a sandwich in slow motion on the table. You can just do a google search for something like "Meat and Masculinity", "Meat and Toxic Masculinity", or "Meat Heads" to see what I'm getting at. Basically, there is the continued association between meat and masculinity when its mostly caged animals and you just go to the grocery and pick it up like any commodity.
[1]https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...