Daniel Stone

Daniel Stone tells stories where science, exploration, and environmental history meet. The Food Explorer follows botanist David Fairchild, whose travels for the United States government helped introduce crops and food plants from many regions into American agriculture. Dutton released the volume in 2018. Stone reconstructs Fairchild's journeys, his collecting methods, his partnership with Barbour Lathrop, and the public debates that followed unfamiliar foods and agricultural experiments. The narrative also connects Fairchild with Alexander Graham Bell through family and scientific circles. Stone has served as a senior editor at National Geographic and a White House correspondent for Newsweek, and he teaches environmental communication at Johns Hopkins University. His reporting background gives the biography a clear interest in how individual expeditions produce lasting changes in culture, farming, and everyday meals over time. Stone’s later books extend that approach in other directions. Sinkable investigates shipwrecks and the deep sea, while American Poison follows physician and public-health advocate Alice Hamilton’s challenge to a destructive industrial invention. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.