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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Pumpkin spice is the flavor of the season, but does anyone think there's real pumpkin in the "science goo" in our lattes? Turns out flavor companies have come up with a simple chemical recipe for it.
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Farmers depend on "Big Data" these days, but some worry the companies collecting information about their operations might misuse it. New privacy guidelines are supposed to protect farmers' interests. -
The federal government is putting $100 million behind a simple idea: doubling the value of federal food benefits when people use them to buy fresh produce. This idea started small but became a hit. -
New brands are reshaping the apple aisle of supermarkets. Many are "club apples" --varieties that are controlled and managed by select groups of farmers. -
A new documentary film follows protesters who occupied a research farm owned by the University of California. The film has become a symbol of the subversive possibilities of urban farming.
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Modern Farmer is less than two years old but it's already won a National Magazine Award. "We're making fun of ourselves, in a way, because we don't know anything about farming," says the editor.
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One man's quest for the perfect loaf took him to Paris, Berlin, California and Kansas. What he learned can't easily be captured in words. It's a feeling in your fingers that comes from experience. -
Farmers will be able to plant types of corn and soybeans that can tolerate doses of two weedkillers. It may be one of the most significant developments the world of weedkilling in more than a decade. -
An expensive delicacy among nuts, pine nuts are foraged — not farmed — from distant forests. In some places, the delicate ecosystems that produce the nuts are disappearing.
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Did your local farmer really grow that heirloom apple he just sold you? California wants to know, so it's sending more inspectors out to make sure the produce sold at markets really is local.
