re: Why are people so fat now compared to just 30 years ago?

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Ok, so it’s the food? Food is an inanimate object that we are blaming

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Again, the biochemical processing of 'food' is not simply thermodynamic. It involves hormonal control as well, with exceedingly complex interactions that I could go over. The nutritional profile of food matters, regardless of whether you want to blame an 'inanimate' object.

If there was any other disease with the same demographic profile illustrated as in the OP, we absolutely would not resort to frankly idiotic defenses of 'individualism' that we do in regards to food. Nearly 70% of Americans are overweight, and 33% are obese, which seems to suggest questions of individual choice are much less important than the nutritional content of the food itself. At those population levels, suggesting people are continually making poor decisions without a distinct physiological cause that is directly modulated by exogenous metabolites would be insane for literally any other disease category. The sheer hesitancy of actually treating obesity as a pathology is why we are in this position.

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Why are people eating these foods?

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Because these foods can modulate physiologic elements so that there is limited satiation, absent effects of leptin, no insulin response in terms of fructose, and no rate-limiting step of fructose metabolism until it either enters glycolysis or becomes pyruvate, at which point it can enter several possible metabolic pathways, depending on macromolecular and micromolecular needs.