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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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The Salt
2:06 pm
Fri November 16, 2012

EPA Says Its Ethanol Rules Aren't Driving Up Food Prices

Credit LM Otero / AP
A sign on the pump advertises the ethanol content of the gasoline as a motorist reaches for the gas pump in his truck at a filling station in Bellmead, Texas.
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Originally published on Sun November 18, 2012 12:47 pm

The ethanol industry is happy with the Environmental Protection Agency today. If you're worried about the price of meat, though, you may not be so pleased.

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The Salt
1:41 pm
Thu November 8, 2012

You Can Thank A Whey Refinery For That Protein Smoothie

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Credit Dan Charles / NPR
Tim Opper, of Cabot Cheese, inspects equipment that separates whey protein from sugar in the company's whey processing plant.
Credit Dan Charles / NPR
In one of the first steps of cheese-making, curds move through this tunnel on a slow-moving belt, separating them from the liquid whey.
Credit Dan Charles / NPR
Wooden containers hold 640-pound blocks of cheddar cheese.
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Originally published on Fri November 9, 2012 6:52 am

If you've ever checked the ingredient list on a PowerBar or a high-protein smoothie, you probably have stumbled across these words: "Whey protein concentrate." You'll find it in a growing number of prepared foods.

This mysterious ingredient is derived from one of the oldest of human foods — milk. But capturing it requires huge factories that look more like oil refineries than farms.

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The Salt
10:19 am
Tue October 23, 2012

Monster Beverage Under Fire As Reports Link Deaths To Its Energy Drinks

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The Food and Drug Administration has confirmed that it received five reports in the past past three years suggesting that people died after drinking caffeinated energy drinks.

But the agency also cautions that these reports do not add up to proof that the beverages actually caused those deaths. These reports — called adverse event reports — are considered unconfirmed allegations, and the FDA doesn't usually release them.

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The Salt
9:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Sugar Beet Labor Battles Spill Out Onto The National Stage

Credit Dale Wetzel / AP
Supporters of American Crystal Sugar Co. workers, who have been locked out of the company's sugar beet processing plants since 2011, rally in the North Dakota Capitol.
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It's not just nutritionists who have a problem with sugar these days, so does organized labor. The AFL-CIO is calling for a boycott of one the country's biggest sugar producers, the American Crystal Sugar Company, based in Moorhead, Minn.

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The Salt
8:53 am
Thu October 18, 2012

Top Five Myths of Genetically Modified Seeds, Busted

Credit Seth Perlman / AP
Central Illinois corn and soybean farmer Gary Niemeyer readies his genetically modified seed corn for spring planting at his farm near Auburn, Ill.
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Originally published on Thu October 18, 2012 2:49 pm

Having just stepped into the shouting match over patents on genetically engineered crops, there are a few small things that I, too, would like to get off my chest.

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The Salt
9:02 am
Tue October 16, 2012

Farmer Tackling Monsanto's Seed Policy Gets A Day In Supreme Court

Credit John Gaps III / AP
Many folks protest Monsanto's business practices, like this Greenpeace protester spraying paint on a company research soybean field in Iowa.
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Originally published on Tue October 16, 2012 12:35 pm

Why do so many people hate Monsanto?

Is it because this multinational corporation pioneered some enormously successful genetically engineered crops, including corn, soybeans and cotton?

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The Salt
1:23 pm
Thu October 11, 2012

How A Sleepy Pennsylvania Town Grew Into America's Mushroom Capital

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Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
Four hundred million pounds of mushrooms come from farms in Chester County, Pa.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
Farms in Chester County, Pa., produce 400 million pounds of mushrooms annually. That's about half of all mushrooms grown in the U.S. They're grown indoors in long, gray cinder-block houses built into the side of a hill.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
Shiitake mushrooms in a growing room at Phillips Mushroom Farms, one of the big mushroom producers in Kennett Square.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
Southeast Asian workers cut shiitake mushrooms at Phillips Mushroom Farms. The mushroom industry in Chester County, Pa., has relied on several waves of immigrant workers, beginning with Italians in the late 1800s.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
At an industrial compost facility that supplies the mushroom industry in Kennett Square, ground-up corn cobs are mixed with chicken manure, hay, cocoa shells and horse manure. Over time, growers have learned that mushrooms grow best with this blend of nutrients.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
Cocoa shells from a Hershey's chocolate plant in Hershey, Pa., are just one ingredient in the compost that mushroom growers use to feed the fungi.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
Every 10 weeks, the beds inside the mushroom rooms are filled with compost mixed with spores, and covered with peat moss. The spores germinate and create a thick web of white threads called mycelia, shown here. As the fungi try to reproduce, they send up their fruit — the mushrooms.
Credit Eliza Barclay / NPR
A Mexican worker at Phillips Mushroom Farms. Workers are paid a little more than minimum wage to cut at least 55 pounds of mushrooms an hour.
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Originally published on Fri October 12, 2012 2:13 pm

Here's an astonishing fact: Half of America's mushrooms are grown in one tiny corner of southeastern Pennsylvania, near the town of Kennett Square.

But why? It's not as though this place has some special advantage of climate or soil, the kind of thing that led to strawberry fields in Watsonville, Calif., or peach orchards in Georgia. Mushrooms can grow indoors. They could come from anywhere.

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The Salt
5:03 am
Mon October 8, 2012

Honey, The Americans Shrank The Apple Trees

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Credit Catalin Petolea / iStockphoto.com
American apple growers realized that if they used dwarfing rootstocks and planted their trees closer together, they could increase their harvest of apples per acre by 200 to 300 percent.
Credit Courtesy of Diane Doud Miller
Harvest time at the Doud family farm in Ohio in 1916 before dwarf apple trees were common in the U.S.
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When Zarrina Mulloboeva got invited to go apple picking the other day, she thought it would be a taste of home. She's an exchange student from Tajikistan, in central Asia — a country close to the ancestral homeland of apples. Her uncle has a small orchard. In fact, when Mulloboeva came to the United States six weeks ago, she brought with her a large bottle of homemade dried apple slices.

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The Salt
12:15 am
Fri October 5, 2012

In Haiti, Aid Groups Squabble Over Rival Peanut Butter Factories

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Credit Alex E. Proimos / Flickr.com
Credit Alex E. Proimos / Flickr.com
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Originally published on Fri October 5, 2012 1:00 pm

Can there be too much life-saving peanut butter?

In Haiti, two different humanitarian groups have built new factories to make this product, which is used to treat severe malnutrition and maybe someday prevent it. The problem is, Haiti doesn't appear to need two of them. Each factory, all by itself, could satisfy Haiti's current demand.

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The Salt
10:48 am
Thu October 4, 2012

The Cost Of Saving Lives With Local Peanuts In Haiti

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Credit Alex E. Proimos / flickr
Credit Alex E. Proimos / flickr
Credit Alex E. Proimos / Flickr
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Originally published on Fri October 5, 2012 1:05 pm

How much extra would you pay for local food? It's a familiar question. We face it practically every time we shop for groceries, either at the store or at the farmers market. But what about food that can save the lives of severely malnourished children?

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