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 world's biggest seed company wants to buy the world's biggest pesticide company. Syngenta is playing hard to get, but a veteran industry executive says the deal may happen. -
The Food and Drug Administration wants to know which farm animals are getting treated most heavily. But the FDA's proposal still falls short of the best European data practices. -
Chipotle says providing "food with integrity" means dropping genetically modified ingredients. But critics say the company's new policy is inconsistent and even dishonest. -
A flu strain deadly to chickens and turkeys is striking farms in the West and Midwest. This week, it hit an Iowa facility with millions of egg-laying hens. No one knows how it's entering houses. -
What's a fair way to divide up California's scarce water? The current system relies heavily on history: Some farmers will get water, others won't, based simply on when their land was first irrigated. -
California is parched. Wells are running dry. Vegetable fields have been left fallow and lawns are dying. Who can we blame? From almonds to politicians to cheap water, here are seven candidates. -
Researchers in Colombia have created new types of beans that can withstand high heat. Many of these "heat-beater" beans resulted from a unique marriage, 20 years ago, of tradition and technology. -
A respected scientific group says that glyphosate, also known as Roundup, is "probably carcinogenic to humans." Yet the actual risks — which are mainly to farmers, not consumers — remain uncertain. -
A new study finds that restrictions on fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles didn't reduce obesity as intended. That's partly because the ban didn't cover the most common types of food stores. -
The results are in from a long-running study of three different ways to house egg-laying chickens. It found that more hens survive in cages, and cages are cheaper. But consumers prefer cage-free eggs.
