Except that they literally said "was supplied by the commercial processing facility." I don't see any reason to doubt their word. And as someone who also works

Except that they literally said "was supplied by the commercial processing facility." I don't see any reason to doubt their word. And as someone who also works in academia, in the kind of mushy low-budget research that these folks might be in, I take issue with the idea that we assume they couldn't just pick up the phone and call the meat processing plant. It's really not hard to do. I've randomly bought fish from fish processing plants, for my own personal consumption, and I didn't even have a grant and a grad student to do it.