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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The federal government collects money from farmers to finance ad campaigns for beef, pork and more than a dozen other commodities. Critics say this turns government into a servant of industry. -
McDonald's USA says that within 10 years, all of its eggs will be from chickens that have some freedom to roam. It's another signal that the egg industry is abandoning traditional cages. -
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. -
While the drought has put a strain on California agriculture, its farms actually set a record for total sales — $54 billion — in 2014. How? By pumping more water from their wells. -
There's a new contender in the century-old quest for perfect, guiltless sweetness: allulose. It's sugar — but in a form that our bodies don't convert into calories. Perfect? Not quite. -
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.
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The USDA is allowing a pork retailer, for the first time, to label products as raised with "no ractopamine." It may lead to pressure on farmers to stop using the muscle-promoting drug. -
According to new research, vegetable farmers who clear away trees and wild vegetation from their fields aren't making their produce any safer to eat. But they are destroying animal habitats. -
In the past 10 years, the global blueberry crop has tripled. Yet the big, round commercial blueberry is a fairly recent innovation. It was created by breeders exactly 100 years ago, in New Jersey. -
The national egg shortage is hitting bakers hard. Some are replacing eggs with highly engineered ingredients that promise to work just as well.
