Ive been playing since the game came out and everyone was stuck on animal lore , and server charshes every hour, and at first with no real storage and lootbags everywhere this made sense , but now its just simply annoying. 
    
What?
 - WALLS AROUND A FURNACE . STONE/WOOD SQUARES AROUND A SLEEEPINGBAG. 
Scenario of people "grouping up" :  - Hi i have  snapped off a branch.   - OH HAI I HAS 3 APPLES!   - OMG LETS BUILD CASTLE WALLS AND A KEEP AROUND OUR STICK AND APPLES! 
Possible solution :  
Make Monuments  consume  food/water   by adding  a storage option to them as it is now with sacrifices , and a certain ammount of resources to even unlock the next upgrade. 
Example ,  registering resources in a claim , or even  monument chest  , that could be looted if you  lose a war/raid  where you put resources in , that have a certain value depending on the item and its quality, like  metal ingots/bars ,  jewelry , or even add a Mint Building to mint gold/silver coins,or add that to Jewelry skill. Same with Food, if your monument runs out of food value your claim radius decreases and  you obvioulsy cant upgrade as part of the requirement is not met ,  food/water and materials should be 2 different values that have to be met . 
This would also boost ingame trade and economy, as now  raw food/ingredients fill up warehouses  without any real purpose, since theres jsut THAT much that you want to eat  yourself,  as some other  suggestion mentioned , water is pretty useless, and huge piles of ores are just thrown away because unless building something ore is tossed aside as people jsut mine for gems. 
    At some point  everyone just needs steel and trading  dies out after a few weeks , as people just sacrifice arrows/bolts and as mentioned before only really need steel. 
If this gets implemented at some point, we would actually see something resembling a settlement before people become "kings" of a pile of dirt, rush walls  and militarize to harass others, unless a rp server , but even then its the same , minus the harass others part.