Why is it so important to express this as one SQL query? Why not just run the two simple queries? It feels as though two different types of things are being joined.
This isn't true if you have certain use cases in your application, pagination being one of them. There's no simple way to implement pagination when you have two or more queries that return and unknown number of results and you're tasked with maintaining a consistent order across page changes.
If you make a single query do all the work, it's easy to implement paging in any number of ways, the most performant being to filter by the last id the client saw. If your users aren't likely to paginate too far into the data, LIMIT and OFFSET will work fine as well.
>In order to audit inventory, the logistics team at the corporate headquarters requests a tool that can generate a report containing all meal_items that left a given store’s inventory on a particular day
That's one thing. The end user doesn't see these as two separate requests just because that's how it's modeled in the database.