Not just the US, sadly. One of the reasons they do it is: transportation costs, and to avoid the attraction of the homeless as it is "bad for business" ("makes us look bad").
This doesn't even get into the gross inefficiency of overweight/obesity where people consume extra calories that make them gain weight which requires them to consume extra calories to carry their surplus weight around, or the amount of energy that is expended just to move them around in automobiles because they can't walk or bike even moderately short distances.
There's a lot of wastage in how we produce and consume food.
Given that we have a policy of over-production, in good years we can easily afford to waste food like that — it's not like we were otherwise either going to eat it all (because developed nations already have an obesity problem in aggregate) or actually donate any significant part of it to good causes (though we could and I'd say we should, even if it's local rather than international e.g. the UK where there's a shockingly large number of people needing to use food banks while also having an overproduction policy).
Question is, what do we do in the bad years?
The US has policies that are outright hostile to mass-transit.
The US has policies that produce some of the ugliest and grossly inefficient suburban environments that have ever existed.
Sure, oil is a critical part of modern civilization, but we could still have modern civilization, and a hell of a better one at that with better policies that end up using far less oil.