I don’t yet have a completely formed picture of my thoughts on Mark Bittman’s move from the food pages of the New York Times to the opinion pages. Sometimes I like what he says, and sometimes, I don’t. (See, for instance, the debate about oatmeal, where Ta-Nehisi Coates has the right of it). Today, though, Bittman is writing about the fast he began on Sunday night as part of a protest against certain budget cuts, and I’m fascinated.

Bittman and 4,000 others, including Bread for the World leader David Beckmann, are fasting this week in protest over the House’s proposed budget bill, which would reduce or eliminate funding for programs that provide food to those at home and abroad who lack the money to buy food and medical aid. There are some very familiar acronyms in play: the WIC program faces up to a 10 percent cut in funding.

His thoughts on the budget and the politics of his action are very clear, in a way that I think should be expressed by more folks who are crying for cuts and slashes:

This is a moral issue; the budget is a moral document. We can take care of the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure and strengthen our safety net by reducing military spending and eliminating corporate subsidies and tax loopholes for the rich. Or we can sink further into debt and amoral individualism by demonizing and starving the poor. Which side are you on?

Yes, that’s oversimplifying a bit, but — it’s not so far off, is it? The moral problem of budgetary debates is always one of identity. Few are willing to see cuts to budgets that they think have an effect on their own lives. So everyone thinks “tax loopholes for the rich” are a bad idea, so long as “the rich” are defined as someone else. It’s easy for many people to say that we should cut funding for the programs that support “the poor” because they consider themselves to be in a group that has escaped that fate only through hard work. The implication, then, is that tired old strain — “Why don’t they just get a job?”

The truth of that matter is much more complicated. Very rarely does one choose to go to bed hungry when there is another option. Bittman has the right of it here, that sometimes it takes walking in someone else’s shoes to figure out how precisely dire and different persistent hunger is from the way that most of us worry about bills and groceries. Hunger is one of the only consequences of dire poverty that can be reproduced authentically — but it’s still not the same. Bittman knows this, and I respect him for it:

And this morning, not having eaten anything in 60 hours, not having had anything to drink except a variety of teas … I was pretty miserable. But it is so not-permanent that it remains a kind of a joke, as in: I’m suffering. Big deal.

Still. It’s not entirely a game. There is the demonstration that hunger matters and there is, a little bit at least, something about empathy here. I understand hunger much better than I ever did. And I expect by late tomorrow afternoon I’ll feel like today was a walk in the park, because all it does is get more difficult.

Poverty-induced hunger is accompanied by other terrible feelings: anxiety and stress that make the body function differently; probably difficult conditions for sleeping and shelter; possibly, also, a much different physical environment. Mark Bittman is able to sip tea and write his columns inside the temperature-controlled New York Times palace while fasting. Most of those who go hungry have few such luxuries. Imagine being a child and being hungry and being at recess, in a threadbare coat, trying to run and keep up with your classmates, burning calories your family can’t afford to replace. Imagine being a hungry mother and trying to nurse a baby.

The truth is that poverty can’t be replicated through forced experience, but awareness of its ancillary effects is never a bad thing. Empathy from experience and empathy from imagination are needed in spades during this debate.

However long his fasting lasts, I’m glad to see Bittman using his expanding pulpit to tackle these issues. His audience is one that probably has little personal experience with hunger, and that makes this just about the best place for him to discuss it. Hurrah, hurrah, for the activist impulse, and for the implication in his piece that, more than anything, he’d like to inspire further thoughtfulness, further consciousness of the problem, among his readers.

Now, if only some of the Times’s real-estate reporters would try homelessness for a week.