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Combing the aisles for affordable grub, Eric Gioia put his week-long Food Stamps diet in a nutshell when he reached for the tomato sauce. A sale – 10 jars for $10 – prompted Gioia to ask if he could get one jar for a buck, and a store clerk nodded accordingly.

Gioia responded with skepticism.

“Are you sure?” Gioia asked. “I don’t have $10.”

The councilman from Woodside wasn’t kidding, either. For seven days starting last Thursday, Gioia ate roughly $28 worth of food – the amount the average New Yorker can purchase per week on Food Stamps. Gioia, along with several other politicians nationwide, is attempting to point out the deficiencies in the current Food Stamp program and wants to concentrate more capital funding toward food-assistance programs.

President Bush has proposed cutting $10 billion from the Federal Farm Bill budget, which would reduce funding for Food Stamps. Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski and U.S. Reps Jim McGovern (D-Mass) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo) are also taking the “Food Stamps Challenge.”

“By walking a mile in someone else’s shoes I want to prove a point to show how difficult this is,” Gioia said. “This is not a Democrat issue or a Republican issue, it’s a moral issue.”

Gioia and Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, scoffed at the system’s fairness. It was Berg who first brought the idea to Gioia’s attention and emphatically denied that this event was a publicity stunt. “We want to dispel the media stereotypes,” Berg said.

Berg, who also will be doing the “Food Stamp Challenge,” added that, “none of us will spend the week pretending that we will truly know what its like to be hungry. However, this exercise will provide a stark demonstration of the extremely difficult choices that low-income New Yorkers are forced to make on a daily basis.”

This first-hand shopping experience thrust Gioia into the tribulations of the poor. There are 1.1 million New Yorkers who receive Food Stamps, 400,000 of whom are children, Berg said. The average weekly allotment for one individual in New York is $28.25. Gioia was joined by Tina Allen, a 39-year-old mother of twin boys who relies on Food Stamps. She served as his financial advisor for the shopping expedition.

Gioia’s shopping spree totaled $24.44 and included five boxes of Ronzoni pasta ($3), three cans of Chicken of the Sea tuna fish (89 cents each), processed American Cheese ($1), a $1 jar of Francesco Rinaldi tomato sauce, two loaves of Key Food brand bread ($1.29 each), Smucker’s Goobers peanut butter and jelly ($2.99), four Ramen noodles packages ($1), six ears of corn ($2), three cucumbers ($2), one stick of butter, five oranges and a hand of bananas.

As he perused the aisles, virtually each item he lifted was based on a fiscal limitation, ignoring nutritional concerns. He stressed that children forced onto a similar diet suffer from nutritional paucity and in turn have trouble learning.

“If you’re doing this on a week-in, week-out basis, you are looking at terrible health conditions,” Gioia said. “When you’re on this kind of budget, the only factor is price.”

As he ventured down several aisles, he was forced to restrain his desires for certain delicacies while keeping copious notes on his budget – coffee, soda, and even certain hot dogs would have pushed him over his budget. Gioia, who often works 16-hour days, has been keeping a food diary this week detailing all his meals. He isn’t afforded any outside meals and will prepare all the food himself.

Gioia spent the remainder of his allotment (all except 2 cents) later in the week, and visited a food pantry near Queensbridge on Tuesday to supplement his diet. Gioia has felt fatigued through this process, refusing to exercise to keep from getting hungry. At one point, after using too much tomato sauce on a pasta meal, he scooped the excess back into its jar.

At the Center of Hope International Food pantry, Gioia’s eyes lit up upon viewing canned vegetables and red meat. The councilman made a $100 donation to offset the cost of his bag of goodies.

“I can’t tell you how excited I am to eat warm vegetables,” he said. “What I’m experiencing is what millions of New Yorkers feel. When the cupboards are bare, the hunger pains don’t go away.”