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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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. -
A 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.
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America's vast fields of corn and soybeans have displaced wildlife and polluted waterways. Farmers could help solve those problems, but often don't, in part because they rent that land.
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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.
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Thousands of meatpacking workers have been infected with the coronavirus. Some of their employers now are rolling out large-scale testing, and their experience may offer lessons for other businesses. -
A federal court ordered farmers to stop spraying one of the country's most widely used herbicides. But the Environmental Protection Agency says farmers can use chemicals that they've already bought.
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When 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. -
The 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. -
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is buying billions worth of food to give it to food banks. But food banks say that SNAP, also known as food stamps, is a better way to get food to people in need.
