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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North Carolina's governor is promising to quickly cut greenhouse emissions but will need to convince Duke Energy, the state's dominant utility, to abandon coal and gas in favor of solar and wind. -
Grocery stores are full of food with labels like organic, cage-free or fair trade that appeal to a consumer's ideals. But there's often a gap between what they seem to promise and what they deliver. -
The world's most widely used weed killer was once seen as one of the safest pesticides. Now it is blamed for causing cancer. Yet the scientific evidence remains disputed. -
Crops that have had their DNA tweaked with new gene-editing tools are entering the food supply. But governments are struggling to figure out how — or even whether — to regulate them. -
Some environmentalists say food production needs a fundamental reboot, with crops that stay rooted in the soil for years, like Kernza, a prairie grass. Even General Mills says it likes the idea. -
In the long-running war between farmers and weeds, it's advantage, weeds. Scientists in Kansas have found examples of the dreaded pigweed that are immune to the newest weed-killing technologies. -
Most beef cattle receive antibiotics in their feed to prevent liver abscesses while eating a high-energy diet. There's growing pressure on feedlots to stop this — and some have. But it's costly. -
Some linguists are arguing that the advent of softer food thousands of years ago led to changes in biting patterns and, eventually, to more frequent use of sounds like "f" and "v" in human languages. -
Stopping climate change won't just mean a halt to burning coal and gasoline. It will mean an end to cutting forests and mining the soil to grow more food. Fortunately, it is possible.
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Stopping climate change will mean big changes for cities, where most people in the world live. To understand how we get there, we visit a city where you can see the seeds of a carbon-free world.
