The State House stairs crawled with lawmakers recessing for lunch, and Meryl Nass followed, hooking a green insulated Whole Foods bag in her elbow and clutching business cards in the opposite fist.
By 12 p.m. last Wednesday on Veto Day, Nass wasn’t feeling so sanguine about the prospects of House Bill 396. It was on the day’s docket because, when legislators sent it to the governor’s desk for her signature, Gov. Kelly Ayotte instead withheld her support, citing concerns that it would force the state to violate federal law. This was the last volley of the legislative session, a chance for lawmakers to override the governor.
The House had met in the morning and failed to galvanize the critical mass needed to advance the legislation. To return from the brink on Veto Day, a bill must clear both bodies of the State House by a two-thirds vote. Despite the setback, Nass sank into a desk chair in the first-floor press room during the lunch break, wearing a knowing smile.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen today. I mean, it failed at the House level already, but there are machinations going on,” she said, holding onto hope that the House might reconsider its vote. “I don’t understand them. So, it may or may not be discussed at the Senate meeting. It’s not clear to me yet.”
House Bill 396 never crossed into the Senate that afternoon. State Rep. Jack Flanagan proposed a reconsideration vote, but that failed, too. Nass sat with two volunteers from her nonprofit, Door to Freedom, on the balcony overlooking the Senate session to no avail.
Earlier, she had been hurrying from the women’s bathroom when she found herself around the corner from Rep. Alexis Simpson’s office. Nass broke into a brisk shuffle to try to catch Simpson, the House’s Democratic leader, but missed her and instead left literature with an aide.
“Improving access to local meat should not be a partisan issue. It is a food security issue and a necessary step toward restoring competition and price moderation to a food system that has become dangerously consolidated,” her flyer read. “New Hampshire farmers should not need Washington’s permission to feed New Hampshire.”
The truth was that House Bill 396 had polarized farmers well before reaching the governor’s desk. Seeing that its membership was split, the New Hampshire Farm Bureau did not take a position on the bill, which would have allowed farmers to slaughter a limited number of their own livestock and sell cuts of meat directly to the public, without first undergoing inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
More than 30 states operate inspection programs that hold to the same stringent standards as federal inspections, but not New Hampshire, where tax dollars are stretched thin. Instead, New Hampshire farmers rely on four USDA-certified slaughterhouses, where many small farmers, who are infrequent customers, can face challenges booking appointments during competitive times of year.
In a letter to the state Agriculture Commissioner Shawn Jasper, an administrator with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service disputed that such a bottleneck exists: “To date, FSIS is not aware of any outstanding or unmet requests for inspection in your state. If a New Hampshire farmer or operator would like USDA inspection, or anticipates a need for such inspection, FSIS will assist them with the process,” the letter, obtained by the Monitor, reads.
But the bill has also morphed into a banner cause for proponents, like Nass, of a complete overhaul of the American food system, a reform of how we engineer, grow and eat our food.
Nass is a 75-year-old grandmother living in East Kingston. She’s also a former internist who had her license to practice medicine suspended in 2022 after prescribing the discredited COVID-19 treatment Ivermectin, conventionally used to treat parasitic worm infections in humans and animals, like horses and livestock. Nass practiced for more than 40 years in Ellsworth, Maine, where her nonprofit is registered, before she hung up her stethoscope and moved to New Hampshire this June.
In her retirement, she’s turned her attention to making this corner of America healthy again.
“I’ve always paid attention to food issues, and how you can actually solve a lot of medical problems, including diabetes. You can reduce the rate of heart disease and other things if you get people eating properly,” she said. “But I didn’t realize how much the food systems, the local food systems, were under attack, and how consolidated the food systems had become, and the quality of food that’s available to us in the supermarkets and the amount of ultra-processed foods — I didn’t realize how that had sort of taken over.”
In the past year, Nass estimates she’s hosted 20 food-and-farming television shows for Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit known for its anti-vaccine advocacy that was founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy chaired the organization from 2015 to 2023, when he took a leave of absence to run his presidential campaign.
Nass’s organization, whose latest project is dubbed Save Our Food and Farms, sponsored two online symposiums on “the attack on food and farms,” one in 2023 and another in 2024. The events borrowed the heft of well-known MAHA advocates such as Zen Honeycutt, executive director of Moms Across America, anti-GMO activist Jeffrey Smith and Kennedy himself.
The movement’s unexpected inertia at the federal level, stymied by what Nass refers to as “captured agencies,” forced her to reevaluate how to further MAHA’s aims.
“We had high hopes, and then unfortunately the USDA and the EPA, because that also relates to farming, were basically filled with lobbyists and industry insiders. And the policies have generally favored industry against farmers and consumers for both agencies,” she said. “We had these two national symposia, and we realized that we would not be able to make changes at the federal level, but that states were doing interesting things.”
House Bill 396 became her crusade. In deregulating the meat slaughter process for very small farmers, Nass believed New Hampshire would be bolstering these farmers’ financial viability and competitive edge, and expanding access to wholesome, locally-sourced meat.
She said eight people associated with her organization met with senators Howard Pearl and Daniel Innis last year, and several testified before lawmakers, including River Sutton, a law student at UNH’s Franklin Pierce School of Law.
When Sutton first met Nass, he recounted in an interview, he thought she was a genius.
“She’s extremely intelligent, extremely sophisticated. She knows everything. I think she’s a great resource for anybody, especially for New Hampshire, as a new resident of the state. And I think her understanding of the systems and the policy behind them is extremely valuable,” he said.
Together on Veto Day, they distributed literature and thought ahead to the next legislative session, when lawyers with Door to Freedom might draft model bill language to push the same initiative again in New Hampshire and in other states.
Flanagan, who put forward the reconsideration vote, said he didn’t know Nass or recognize her name but instead went to bat for the bill because he’d heard from a cattle farmer in his district who expressed concerns about ethical euthanization at busy USDA-inspected slaughterhouses. Also, because “a couple of fellow legislators twisted my arm,” he said.
He underscored in his parliamentary inquiry that “we’re dealing with small farmers, not large farmers,” and acknowledged, presciently, that he expected he would receive a call from the agriculture commissioner, who didn’t support the bill as written, once Veto Day was over.
“I did get a phone call on the way home from Concord the day of Veto Day,” Flanagan said in an interview. “[My speech] was just to emphasize my position on the reconsideration, that I wasn’t afraid of him.”
The vote’s failure dealt the bill a death blow.
Online, Nass’s influence is unencumbered by two-thirds majorities, political allegiances or party lines. Her Substack, Meryl’s CHAOS letters — which stands for “Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS” — has more than 48,000 subscribers. She ranks 17th in the platform’s “health politics” category.
She said she’s built her social cache through footnotes, providing references for any claims she makes when she gives talks or testifies before Congress. “If I hadn’t done that, I would be everybody else on the internet.”
“Amazingly, people don’t accuse me of that, [of being a conspiracy theorist]. I’m sort of known for getting my facts, being very good at getting the facts right,” Nass said. “People, usually, they don’t challenge me because they know that I’ve looked it up and I’ve probably gotten it — I’m sorry, that sounds like I’m blowing my own horn, but people leave me alone. They don’t try that stuff on me.”
Nass looks through the MAHA viewfinder and sees a convergence of issues of legitimate concern to farmers, as well as to doctors and families advocating for America to first define and then crack down on ultra-processed foods.
Just four meatpacking companies control 85% of the United States’ beef processing market: Brazil-based JBS, Cargill, Tyson Foods and National Beef, according to reporting in Investigate Midwest, a nonprofit newsroom.
In November 2025, President Donald Trump called for a Department of Justice investigation to ensure these companies are “not criminally profiting at the expense of the American people,” but earlier that year, Trump’s inauguration committee accepted a $5 million donation from JBS’s American subsidiary, Pilgrim’s Pride. It was the largest single contribution to Trump’s inauguration event.
The U.S. cattle herd hit a record low in January 2026. The administration’s push to supplement the domestic supply of beef by lifting tarrifs on 300,000 metric tons of imported beef, however, has made farming groups and high-ranking Republicans bristle. Flooding the market could have the opposite effect, devaluing domestic beef.
Half-measures and diversion at the federal level have convinced Nass that MAHA’s future successes will percolate upward from the states.
“Yes, we are going against federal law, and we need to because there’s a federal law that’s been on the books for 60 years, and it’s not helping,” she said. “I think we will win this one way or the other. I mean, it’s such a good bill. It’s a nonpartisan bill. It helps everybody who eats meat. It helps every small farmer.”
