A lot of the meat comes from a parent who feels compelled to send all the kids frozen meat two or three times a year.
People die and we get tasked with doing freezer clean and pantry clean outs.
Local food bank will put stuff out front that anyone can claim.
We will drive homeless people to food pickup spots and sometimes we end up with stuff from that.
I grow it from free seeds available at the library. 5 seed packets per week.
People end up with a surplus and call us to get it. One vegetarian friend ended up with four frozen turkeys. I turned two into canned turkey and stock. Gave one away, still have one in the chest freezer.
That same vegetarian ended up giving me a bunch of weird 4 oz cuts of frozen meats from whatever senior meal service they get. Those are generally useless for most tasks but you can add it to mac and cheese or fried rice.
Very rarely someone will have a rooster that needs to go and they don’t have the ability to do it themselves but they know I will take care of it. And by take care of it I mean eat it, not care for it.
I do a fair amount of volunteer work with cats. Sometimes I get a call to get free animal feed. Currently sitting on 240 pounds of dog and 120 pounds of cat food from a call a few weeks ago. Whole there I was told to pull anything I wanted from their garden beds because they were about to turn them over. I got a lot of green onions out of that and replanted them in my raised beds. Two years ago at a different place I was forced to take pounds of peppers from someone. I diced it all up and pickled it. I gave them half.
Normally free items only account for about one non herb ingredient per meal. If it’s the meat then that dramatically cuts the cost of a meal.
So basically I get it from everywhere. If I can’t use it, I know people who can.
