Track And Food Podcast

This week, I'm joined by Liz Carlisle and Aubrey Streit Krug, co-editors of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods (Island Press, March 3, 2026), a new collection from The Land Institute and UC Santa Barbara that asks a deceptively simple question: what would agriculture look like if we stopped starting over every year?Perennial crops (plants that come back season after season without replanting) aren't just an agronomic curiosity. They're a lens for examining everything that's broken about the annual monoculture system we've inherited: the debt structures that trap farmers; the subsidies that reward the wrong behaviour; the land ownership patterns that keep wealth concentrated; and the labour arrangements that keep the people doing the work structurally excluded from the land they tend.In this episode we talk about Kernza (a perennial grain that’s heavily featured in Living Roots); the Forest-Grassland-Grain structure of Carlisle and Streit Krug's book; and whether restaur