Imagine a school lunch program with entrees containing only 6 percent of calories from fat, almost completely based on nutrient-dense USDA commodity plant foods such as dried beans, lentils, bulgur wheat and brown rice, and -- here is the hard-to-imagine part -- is readily eaten by children.

Yet such food is being served -- and consumed -- in six schools across the nation, thanks to a pilot program developed at Cornell University.

"My research shows that children will eat up to 20 times more low-fat, high-fiber foods if they first learn about them through hands-on experience in the classroom," said Antonia Demas, Cornell Ph.D. '95, who developed the award-winning multicultural food education curriculum for her doctoral thesis.

From New Mexico and the lower east side of Manhattan to upstate New York and Boston, children are learning about, preparing, sampling and then eating in their cafeterias such healthful foods as dill-lightful bulgur and veggies, calconnon (Peruvian potatoes with an Irish twist), three sisters casserole (beans, corn, squash and maple syrup), soul stew (black-eyed peas, corn, collards, molasses), Chinese bean dumplings, pasta primavera, couscous chili, chutney and curry.

"Children usually reject low-fat versions of foods they're used to, but by involving the students in preparing healthful, international foods in the classroom, and teaching them about nutrition through the study of other cultures, food and cooking, the children accept these foods and even ask their families to prepare them," said Demas, whose curriculum received the Society for Nutrition Education Excellence in Nutrition Education Award and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Most Creative Implementation of the Dietary Guidelines Award last year.

After the highly successful pilot project of the curriculum in Trumansburg, N.Y., that showed how powerful experiential learning about food in the classroom is in getting children to taste diverse, low-fat foods, Demas received more than 100 inquiries about the program from schools and community groups across the nation. The curriculum, which now includes school gardens, is school-wide in The Crestwood Children's Center in Rochester, N.Y.; P.S. 61 in New York, where all the children, primarily black and Hispanic, receive free lunch; and two elementary schools in Santa Fe, N.M. The curriculum is also part of the third grade in Somerville and Lynn, Mass., and is in collaboration with Tufts University and the AtlantiCare Medical Center.

The curriculum involves engaging the senses in preparing the foods, such as making pasta, curry and chutney; smelling and using fresh herbs; feeling the stickiness of butter and relating that to clogged arteries; a cross-cultural history on the use of grains and other healthful plant foods; units on countries such as China, Italy and India and their unique foods, and how foods connect to other subjects in school, such as history, social studies, math, reading, geography and science.

T. Colin Campbell, Cornell professor and director of the Cornell-China-Oxford Project and pediatricians Dr. Benjamin Spock and Dr. Charles Attwood endorse Demas' curriculum and are board members of her forthcoming non-profit organization to institute the program on a much wider basis.