Roko:

it seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view (e.g. food before status, because if you run out of calories you die right there)

That's not necessarily true -- there are instances where people starve themselves (though rarely to death) as part of a status-seeking effort.

In the modern developed world, food is dirt-cheap as long as you don't engage in luxurious extravagance, so that even if you could stop eating altogether, you wouldn't save a significant amount of money. However, in the past, when even the cheapest subsistence diet was a very large expense relative to income, many people would cut down on eating well beyond the point of discomfort to be able to afford various status-seeking goods to show off. Some other examples of status-seeking behavior that comes at the cost of starvation are religious fasting and dieting to improve one's looks. Hunger strikes are a peculiar extreme example.

Overall, Maslow's model is a useful first approximation, but nowhere near fully accurate.