Welcome to the Track & Food podcast. Host Jamie Mah is a writer, bartender and sommelier in beautiful Vancouver, BC. Join him as he takes a deep dive into everything food and culture happening in the city and around the globe.

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 restaurants can do for perennial foods what they did for farm-to-table. The hard question at the centre of it all: is this a complement to the system we already have in place, or an argument that the system itself is the problem?

Liz Carlisle is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. Born and raised in Montana, she got her start in agriculture working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester — an experience that launched a decade of research and writing with farmers in her home state. She’s the author of Lentil Underground, Grain by Grain (with Bob Quinn), and Healing Grounds, and is co-editor, with Aubrey Streit Krug, of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Folklore and Mythology from Harvard. Before academia, she spent several years touring rural America as a country singer.

Aubrey Streit Krug is a writer and researcher at The Land Institute, where she directs the Perennial Cultures Lab. Her work sits at the intersection of ecology, culture, and agriculture — investigating Great Plains landscapes, crop domestication, and what it means for communities to build long relationships with the plants that feed them. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Great Plains Studies, and co-edited Living Roots with Liz Carlisle.