Dan Charles
Dan Charles is NPR's food and agriculture correspondent.
Primarily responsible for covering farming and the food industry, Charles focuses on the stories of culture, business, and the science behind what arrives on your dinner plate.
This is his second time working for NPR; from 1993 to 1999, Charles was a technology correspondent at NPR. He returned in 2011.
During his time away from NPR, Charles was an independent writer and radio producer and occasionally filled in at NPR on the Science and National desks, and at Weekend Edition. Over the course of his career Charles has reported on software engineers in India, fertilizer use in China, dengue fever in Peru, alternative medicine in Germany, and efforts to turn around a troubled school in Washington, DC.
In 2009-2010, he taught journalism in Ukraine through the Fulbright program. He has been guest researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 1990 to 1993, Charles was a U.S. correspondent for New Scientist, a major British science magazine.
The author of two books, Charles wrote Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, The Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (Ecco, 2005) and Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Perseus, 2001) about the making of genetically engineered crops.
Charles graduated magna cum laude from American University with a degree in economics and international affairs. After graduation Charles spent a year studying in Bonn, which was then part of West Germany, through the German Academic Exchange Service.
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More than half of America's sweet potatoes were lifted by hand from the soil of North Carolina. It's some of the most back-breaking farm work to be found, and migrant laborers do most of it. -
In a long-awaited ruling, the agency said that a salmon created to grow faster is fit for human consumption. Environmental and food safety groups vow to fight the decision. -
Rinderpest, or cattle plague, was declared eradicated in 2011. But many research institutes still have samples of the rinderpest virus in storage. Disease experts want those samples destroyed. -
Some Chipotle restaurants now sell pork from pigs that received antibiotics to treat illness. It's a move that acknowledges the drugs can be used responsibly on farms. -
It's apple-picking time. For some of us, that's casual recreation. For tens of thousands of people, though, it's a paycheck — and one stop in a migratory life. -
A new study of drinking water in areas where fracking is used to extract natural gas found that contamination is not common and it probably did not come from deep underground.
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Many alternative food brands have been swallowed by big food companies. Recently, Perdue bought Niman Ranch, which sells "natural" meat. But after a sale, will shoppers feel the product is the same? -
Former Peanut Corporation of America CEO Stewart Parnell's sentence is by far the harshest U.S. authorities have handed down in such cases. Emails revealed he and others knowingly sold tainted food. -
Newly released emails from the American Egg Board reveal embarrassing details about its fight against the vegan product Just Mayo. Industry critics say the board's antics may have broken the law. -
Australia suffered through a truly epic drought, and it survived. But some of Australia's solutions — like a free market for water — may be too radical for the Golden State.
