Leigh Merinoff has been living the principles now associated with Make America Healthy Again long before MAHA had a name. For nearly two decades, her work has connected real food, small farms, practical education, community resilience and health. A board member and strategic initiatives leader at MAHA Action, Merinoff is building on the work she’s been passionate about for years.
Before she became a farmer, educator, or advocate, Merinoff was a sculptor, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York. She credits that artistic training with teaching her to observe closely, imagine what does not yet exist, and then make it tangible.
“As an artist, you learn to build things that weren’t there before,” she said.
Where the Vision Took Shape
The turning point in Merinoff’s life came during her roughly ten years working for Heifer International, a non-profit focused on creating sustainable farming and addressing poverty and hunger.
Traveling through Asia, Africa, and South and Central America, Merinoff encountered families living in extreme poverty, but she also witnessed what happened when those same families received livestock, agricultural training and practical skills: they could grow food and generate income. Through Heifer’s “Passing on the Gift” model, recipients commit to extending the opportunity to another family traditionally by passing on offspring from the livestock they receive, along with the skills and knowledge they have gained.
She watched communities move from profound scarcity toward stability and, in some cases, abundance.
“We saw that poverty can be ended,” Merinoff said. “There are answers to questions. You just need to have the will and the skill to put them in.”
Those experiences eventually sent her home asking a different question: in a country surrounded by abundance, how much of our own ability to feed ourselves, make things, and solve practical problems have we lost?
Merinoff began to look at her own life differently. After more than a dozen trips abroad, she’d return from communities where people had practically nothing to American grocery stores overflowing with brightly packaged food. She realized that, despite all that abundance, she lacked many of the basic skills she had witnessed abroad.
“I was a sculptor,” she said. “I didn’t grow anything… I literally couldn’t take care of myself.”
Eventually, that realization became impossible to ignore.
“I can build,” she remembers thinking. “So go build something.”
Building Meadows Bee
In 2006, Merinoff purchased land in Vermont and founded Meadows Bee Farm, devoted to teaching young people about ecological farming and farming arts.
She wasn’t interested in simply producing food for other people. She wanted to learn how to do things herself and then teach others.
The farm expanded into livestock, gardens, and food production, and the community ecosystem began to flourish as she helped revive an old community store and a post office and started a café, a farmers market, and a teaching kitchen.
Over time, her attention increasingly turned toward children, a focus that now feels especially personal as the mother of two adult children, Leslie and Andrew, and a new grandmother of two.
The reason, she says, is simple: children still want to try things.
Show a child how to milk a cow, turn that milk into yogurt, pick berries and make a smoothie, Merinoff says, and the child doesn’t just want to sit there and observe. The child wants to participate.
That insight became the foundation of Meadows Bee’s Young Farmers Program, an experiential curriculum in which children earn badges by demonstrating skills in subjects ranging from livestock and gardening to cooking, sewing and homesteading.
Merinoff intentionally made the badges difficult to earn.
A child who completes one should know, she says, “that they earned this.”
Her latest project is Young Farmer Starts, designed to take her desire to teach the next generation beyond Vermont. The national program begins with hands-on experiences that families, farms, homesteads, and schools can replicate, connecting children with farming, food, and practical skills. The mission of Young Farmer Starts is to build “capable, confident kids,” as Merinoff’s ultimate goal is to help return home economics to American schools.
“My ultimate goal is to get every fourth grader in America to know how to make chicken soup.”
It sounds modest, but for Merinoff, it represents something bigger.
A pot of soup can teach children where food comes from, how ingredients become a meal, how to nourish themselves, and how to stretch food economically. More importantly, it gives them something modern childhood increasingly lacks: competence in the kitchen.
“Get children to start using their hands,” she said.
Nearly 20 years later, Meadows Bee has grown well beyond a small family operation. A team that includes farm and garden, livestock, and education managers, along with teachers, interns, and WWOOF volunteers, keeps the farm and its programming running. Merinoff says she deliberately built it that way, so it could continue without her daily presence.
Creating Change
Merinoff and her husband of 40 years, Charles, who is chairman of their family business, Breakthru Beverage Group, a national wine and spirits distributor, frequently had the opportunity to meet with policymakers. Merinoff began using that access to raise issues outside of the beverage business, particularly agriculture, the PRIME Act, and her longstanding interest in bringing home economics, farming, and shop skills back into American education.
Over time, she became less interested in political affiliation and more interested in whether policies actually produced results.
“I cannot call myself a Democrat,” she remembers concluding. “I can only call myself someone who supports this policy.”
That philosophy eventually brought her into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign orbit and then into the organizations that grew out of the MAHA movement.
At MAHA Center, Merinoff helped build the organization’s structure and launch the Chiropractic Hub. The hub now has its own executive director, committees, a website and eight areas of focus spanning education and research. It is also supporting H.R. 539, legislation intended to expand Medicare access to chiropractic services, which Merinoff says currently has 174 congressional co-sponsors.
Further, Merinoff is deeply involved with the Rural Health Transformation Program. Over the past year, Merinoff has worked with governors and state officials, including West Virginia Secretary of Health Dr. Arvin Singh, to identify ways the program can support rural communities. She says the MAHA Center team has now submitted 25 vendor applications connected with that work.
She is currently helping build additional health and food-focused hubs at MAHA Center, while participating in media, roundtables and events designed to move MAHA priorities from ideas into implementation.
Observe. Learn. Participate. Build something.
Yet even as the scale of Merinoff’s work has expanded from a Vermont farm to Washington, her approach has remained consistent: observe closely, imagine something better, and then get to work building it.
“If you have anything wrong that you don’t like about this country,” she said, “then go participate and try to fix it.”
That insistence on participation is the thread connecting her life’s journey. She has taught children to use their hands rather than simply watch. She has encouraged families to understand where their food comes from. She has brought farmers into conversations with lawmakers and pushed citizens to read legislation, identify what they want changed, and advocate for it themselves.
And she has little patience with the idea that meaningful change is someone else’s responsibility.
“Come up with the one thing you want to change,” she said. “And then advocate for it.”
During our conversation, Merinoff lightheartedly described herself as the “MAHA grandma” surrounded by a generation of MAHA moms. The description made me smile, but the more I listened to her, the more fitting it seemed.
There is something uniquely inspiring about the way Merinoff moves through the world. She sees potential in a neglected building, an unused piece of land, a child who has never milked a cow, a policy that has stalled for years, and immediately begins thinking about what it could become. Her instinct is not merely to criticize what is broken, but to gather people, teach skills, create tangible solutions, and invite others to join her in the work.
That creativity may be one of her greatest contributions to MAHA. Movements need policy experts and advocates, but they also need builders: people capable of looking beyond what exists and imagining what is possible.
Today, the materials are different. Instead of clay or stone, she’s working with farms, schools, communities, legislation, and ideas. But the artistic impulse remains the same.
After speaking with Merinoff, it is difficult not to come away energized. As a mother, I am grateful that someone with her imagination, persistence, and decades of experience is helping shape the future of the MAHA movement.
Perhaps, most importantly, she is still asking the question that has driven her work for decades:
What can we build together?
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