The Food and Nutrition Service is issuing final regulations amending the meal pattern for infants less than 12 months of age in the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program, and the Child and Adult Care Food Program. These regulations finalize provisions of an interim rule, published on Nov. 15, 1999, which eliminated the option of serving whole cow's milk to infants less than one year of age, allowed reimbursement for meals containing only breastmilk, and amended the Child and Adult Care Food Program's definition of infant formula.
This final rule also incorporates revisions to reflect the comments we received to the interim rule, clarifies when an optional food component is required under the infant meal pattern, and clarifies information in the meal pattern tables that have appeared in two previous rulemakings. We have made these changes to ensure that the infant meal pattern used in the child nutrition programs conforms to current scientific evidence about infant feeding practices, and to ensure that all of the information about meal requirements is correct.