Perhaps Mr. Kernion might repent of his attitude were he deprived of the products of rural America for a year.
No, he wouldn't starve, but having to eat only imported foods will be a strain on his budget on a graduate teaching assistant or adjunct instructor stipend (and no lunches or dinners at Chez Panisse, which uses only locally sourced ingredients, i.e. ingredients from rural California near Berkeley, even if his advisor is picking up the tab). And, it will be interesting to see how he manages to perform his teaching duties without using paper derived from trees farmed in rural areas (regardless of how much recycled content it has, it all came from there) and without using any electricity generated in rural areas.
An awful lot of leftist idiocy is actually urban idiocy, and Mr. Kernion seems a perfect example of the phenomenon.