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.
-
The pandemic has exacerbated food insecurity in the U.S. And while the government has programs to assist struggling Americans in accessing food, it's not always enough.
-
The Trump administration has been buying food from farmers and getting it to food banks. Food banks, however, say the program was not set up to deliver food efficiently. -
NewsRattan Lal, an Indian-born scientist, has devoted his career to finding ways to capture carbon from the air and store it in soil. Today, that idea has a catchy name: regenerative agriculture. -
For more than a century, food has been getting more abundant, and cheaper. Yet people keep worrying about food shortages. Some economists say the fears actually create their own problems. -
NewsA trillion dollars worth of American farmland will change hands in the coming years. Wealthy investors are likely to buy more of it with the power to shape rural communities and the environment. -
Satellite images show that a small minority of farmers are responsible for most of the deforestation in Brazil. Scientists are calling on international grain traders to stop buying from those farmers.
-
Some major environmental problems in the U.S. stem from using vast tracts of land to grow agricultural crops. But farmers are often limited to reduce that damage because they don't own the land.
-
Bayer has agreed Wednesday to settle lawsuits from people who say that they got cancer from the company's most widely used weed killer. The company will pay more than $10 billion.
-
NewsWhen COVID-19 infections forced pork companies to close processing plants, some farmers predicted that it would force them to euthanize millions of hogs. The actual number has been much lower. -
NewsThe charitable organizations called food banks are getting a lot of attention and donations right now. But they aren't nearly as important or effective as SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.
