Dan Charles

McDonald's USA says that within 10 years, all of its eggs will be from chickens that have some freedom to roam. It's another signal that the egg industry is abandoning traditional cages.

Newly released emails from the American Egg Board reveal embarrassing details about its fight against the vegan product Just Mayo. Industry critics say the board's antics may have broken the law.

While the drought has put a strain on California agriculture, its farms actually set a record for total sales — $54 billion — in 2014. How? By pumping more water from their wells.

There's a new contender in the century-old quest for perfect, guiltless sweetness: allulose. It's sugar — but in a form that our bodies don't convert into calories. Perfect? Not quite.

Australia suffered through a truly epic drought, and it survived. But some of Australia's solutions — like a free market for water — may be too radical for the Golden State.

The USDA is allowing a pork retailer, for the first time, to label products as raised with "no ractopamine." It may lead to pressure on farmers to stop using the muscle-promoting drug.

According to new research, vegetable farmers who clear away trees and wild vegetation from their fields aren't making their produce any safer to eat. But they are destroying animal habitats.

In the past 10 years, the global blueberry crop has tripled. Yet the big, round commercial blueberry is a fairly recent innovation. It was created by breeders exactly 100 years ago, in New Jersey.

Eggs are becoming more expensive and scarce recently because so many chickens have died from avian flu. So bakers, in particular, are looking for cheaper ingredients that can work just as well.

The national egg shortage is hitting bakers hard. Some are replacing eggs with highly engineered ingredients that promise to work just as well.

Chicken bones unearthed in Israel may mark a turning point in human cuisine: They could be the earliest evidence of people raising chickens for food, rather than cockfighting or use in ceremonies.

On the quest for cottage cheese trivia this week for my story for Morning Edition, I asked our research department for help. Researcher Barclay Walsh sent me a photo that stopped me in my tracks.

Take a look. Notice the official White House emblem on the plate. The silver ...

Cottage cheese was the yogurt of the mid-20th century: a dairy product for the health-conscious. But it has fallen out of favor, while marketing of — and demand for — yogurt has soared.

Making yogurt requires bacteria — but which strains of bacteria? There are dozens to choose from, and that choice affects yogurt's tartness and texture.

Edgar Diaz poured his heart into building a yogurt company whose product won accolades. So why did he burn down his factory? The answer is a kind of love story: an ill-fated love affair with yogurt.

Wild bees are some of nature's busiest pollinators of crops and flowers. But new evidence suggests a warming climate is squeezing the bounds of where bumblebees can live.

The U.S. government's system for regulating the products of biotechnology, including GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, was born in 1986, and it has been controversial from the start. Now, it will be getting a makeover — in part to assure the public that GMOs really are adequately regulated.

The White ...

Rearranging veggie genes is big business, and we're not even talking about biotechnology. Private companies and university researchers spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year breeding better genetic varieties of food crops.

But organic farmers say those programs have a big blind spot when it comes to figuring ...

Will agricultural chemical dealers start selling microbes? Some big pesticide companies are investing in efforts to turn soil bacteria into tools that farmers can use to grow more food.

Some organic farmers are protesting a new system Whole Foods is using to rate its suppliers. They say the system devalues the organic label because nonorganic producers can earn the highest grades.