M egan grew up in the rolling hills and abundant farmland of Western Massachusetts, and has been passionate about food quality and healthfulness for much of her life. In 2002, she graduated cum laude from Scripps College with a bachelor’s degree in art. Her senior thesis, “Conscious Eating Tableware,” was a ceramics work advocating thoughtful food choices, and reflected substantial study into the effects of pesticides on the human body.

After Scripps she worked as a manager at Green’s Restaurant in San Francisco, while pursuing private studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine and the healing properties of food. She also spent a year on the operations team at the Heartwood Institute in Northern California, where the noticeable benefits of the exclusively organic, whole foods diet furthered her commitment to the value of safe, healthy food.

In 2004 she moved to Tucson, where she held the position of Outreach Coordinator at the Food Conspiracy Co-op. Her roles there included managing membership, marketing, donations, customer education, and serving as the editor for the Co-op’s newsletter. Part of her job was to maintain a unique labeling program that involved putting shelf tags by each product in the store indicating GMO risk. This important but challenging task brought her attention to the need for a consistent, industry-wide standard for non-GMO, and inspired her to start volunteering time and energy to help launch the Non-GMO Project concept when she first heard about it in early 2006.

When she moved back to the Bay Area in the summer of 2006 she began passionately investing her time and energy into the Project, and in April of 2007 was hired to be its first Executive Director. She now resides in Bellingham, WA, where she and her husband Noah are are developing an organic permaculture homestead on their beautiful 5 acres.