The intervention to be evaluated is meat fed daily as a complementary food from age 6-18 months. Thirty infants-toddlers in each of 60 rural communities (total of 1,800 subjects) will participate. In a cluster design, twenty communities (test) will be randomized to receive meat,twenty communities (control) will receive a plant recipe providing the same amount of calories, twenty communities (fortified cereal) will receive a commercially available fortified cereal providing the same amount of calories. This project will be located in rural China in a county where high quality collaboration is already established, and where we have recently demonstrated inadequate bioavailable zinc intake and zinc deficiency in toddlers. We have also found a high (30%) incidence of stunting, now widely used as an indirect indicator of populations with zinc deficiency. Other advantages of this location include the willingness of doctors located in each rural community to provide the test or control meal 7 days per week in their homes and the absence of any access to supplements / fortified products which could complicate interpretation of data. The young children in the test communities will receive certified safe lean pork 7 days per wk. Starting with a very small quantity at 6 months, the quantity of lean pork will be increased as infants are ready to take more up to a plateau of 2 oz/d. No subsequent increases are planned because neither zinc nor iron requirements increase from 6-11 months to 12-18 months. Lean pork will be used because pigs are ubiquitous in China and can be maintained cheaply by scavenging/foraging on waste materials adjacent to human habitation. Test and control clusters will also receive nutrition education to achieve maximal diversification of locally available affordable foods. Longitudinal outcome measures include indices of physical growth, especially length; infectious disease incidence and prevalence; cognitive development; zinc and iron intake and biomarkers for these and other micronutrients. Zinc absorption will be measured. Data will flow daily from communities to the district hospital in Xi-Chou, weekly to the data manager in Shanghai and 3-monthly to the Data Monitoring Safety Board (DSMB) and to the University of Colorado research group.