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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A record-setting "dead zone," where water doesn't have enough oxygen for fish to survive, has appeared this summer. One major cause is pollution from farms. -
The poultry industry may be on the verge of adopting ambitious new animal-welfare standards, giving chickens more space and daylight, and even returning to older, slower-growing chicken breeds. -
Whole Foods has been forced to stop selling goat cheese made from milk that came from a prison farm, where inmates work for less than a dollar an hour. Yet the inmates themselves aren't complaining. -
There's a global shortage of vanilla beans because big food companies now want natural vanilla, rather than the synthetic kind. Prices have soared, squeezing bakers and ice cream makers alike. -
This spring, orchards in Washington state are being ripped up to make room for a new apple variety called Cosmic Crisp. This is what happens before it hits store shelves. -
David Fisher's farm is a kind of American Dream. Not the conventional one of upward economic mobility. This is the utopian version, the uncompromising pursuit of a difficult agrarian ideal. -
The world's largest seed company, Monsanto, is being bought by Germany-based chemical company, Bayer. Farmers at a farm show in Canada are wondering if this will reduce competition.
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Many farm workers call blueberries their favorite crop to pick. It pays well and the work is comfortable. But there's a catch: It's a short season, and workers and their families have to keep moving. -
Perdue Farms, one of the largest poultry companies in the country, says it will change its slaughter methods and also some of its poultry houses. Animal welfare groups are cheering. -
Canada, despite its cold weather, ships more fresh tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers to the U.S. than we send the other way. How? With the continent's largest cluster of greenhouses.
