Where do you shop? My local supermarket usually has American stuff when it is in season, imported when out of season since South America has the opposite seasons from us. Frankly, I like having fresh fruits and vegetables during the winter when America cannot produce it because it is winter. Perhaps I am wrong or it is only the area I live in, but food is one area I have not noticed imports taking over the market. Do you even know or have an idea of how much Diesel fuel a farmer goes through a year, plowing, planting, fertilizing, weeding and then harvesting? Then there is trasportation to processing centers, trasportation to distribution centers and finally delivery to your local market, all done on Diesel fuel. Diesel goes up right along with gasoline, nowdays, it is usually higher in price. So your $40 a gallon would raise the price of a head of lettuce so high that the average American could not afford it.
Don't buy Gas? It Would be really nice if everyone did have that option, but how many US cities actually have efficient available public transportation that can meet the needs of all of it's citizens? For that matter, how many cities even have enough public trans to get workers from their homes to their work places? Until that option becomes available for everyone, then some people don't have the option to not buy gas. Unless of course they just quit their jobs and live on welfare, then they wouldn't have to drive to work, yep, that would really help America out.
Enviromentalist love this theory of raising prices of gas to encourage alternatives, but where are the alternatives? Natural gas, sure, where do I buy it? Will I be able to get it at various places along a route when I travel? And some eviromentalist don't even support the use of natural gas but insist that zero emmission non internal combustion engines are the only acceptable alternative. Fine, where are these practical electric cars at? Give the American people an affordable, practical alternative and they will change, but don't try to force them to change when those affordable and practical alternatives do not exist yet. If all these enviromentalist would pool their money and use it to create alternatives and then offer them on the open markety, they would already have the changes they seek and would of spent less than 1/10 of what they have spent lobbing for laws to bully us into changing when there are not practical affordable alternatives.
Also, take a look at what happened the last time gas prices got this high and remained there. People defaulted on mortgages and credit. The economy came crashing down. If $5/gallon gas hurts our economy that bad, what would our economy look like at $40/gallon. Guess the oil companies would make no profit then because no-one would have a job to get money to buy the gas, or food, or clothing or shelter, etc, etc.