I wish I understood C better so I could understand why this is a memory leak ;w;
Well, like... a bad one at least. As far as I understand, the bug in this code is that the for loop re-uses meal_ptr for a bunch of *different* mallocs (memory blocks of size sizeof(MEAL)), but then it only frees meal_ptr *after* the for loop, meaning that only one of the blocks actually gets freed... but it doesn't seem like this would be that much of a problem unless this whole snippet runs multiple times in the program. Because if it only runs once, it's just a chunk of memory being wasted (though maybe this could be bad if sizeof(MEAL) is really large) and not a continuous memory leak...

Or maybe I just misunderstand entirely >w<

That's basically what's happening, yeah xP

and you're right that if meal_num is small, then the effect won't be too large

But in this case meal_num is probably somewhere around the 1 billion area xP

Ahhh, I see >w<