I don't really feel like you're obliged to pick up every piece of food you pass, and I would not want the game balanced around that point.
Resting tied to resources will never be a viable balancing mechanic because:
1. The economy will never be balanced. Economies in fantasy games are never balanced. There is always an easy exploit somewhere, because
2. If people have cool spells they want to use their cool spells, not feel trepidation over using their cool spells because they are struggling to afford groceries.
All resting tied to resources is good for is getting you to think about these things a little bit, which I believe the current system does just fine. It could be tightened up a bit, but you don't want to punish people for experimenting with their abilities or getting creative with new approaches to combat that didn't go perfectly as planned. The idea of short rests requiring resources is cool and would be especially nice if it could be tweaked so that you have to save up for a long rest but you could feed yourself for a short rest with what you find around. (So you happen upon the goblin's dining room, that signals a good time for a short rest.) Both of these are really just mechanics-as-flavor, though. You don't want to actually be fretting about when you can take short rests, and you only want to fret in the slightest about long rests.
Not allowing the player to instantly teleport back to where they were would discourage long resting more than any resource cost. Players would opt to keep pressing on in order to avoid running through 10 minutes of cleared forest more readily than they would to avoid using up camp supplies.
We're not playing Oregon Trail. Nobody wants their Baldur's Gate 3 ending to be "starved to death."
