Perennial Foods are the Slow Fashion of Agriculture

On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes dives into a new book, Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods, with its editors edited by Liz Carlisle and Aubrey Streit Krug. Perennials are plants that live for more than 1 year, like trees, bushes, and long grasses. We eat perennials when we eat tree nuts, tree fruits, and even some grass-fed meat. These plants are so important for ecosystem health because their roots go to work year-over-year. 

Carlisle says that our current food system is set up like fast fashion, to be cheap and wasteful. Currently, there’s a dominance of commodity crops like corn, soy, and wheat, that are hurriedly assembled into low-cost products through fossil-fuel intensive processes that produce a “stupefying” amount of waste. 

Carlisle and Streit Krug wanted to create a food system that is made to last, and that’s where perennials come in. From acorns and hollyleaf cherries found in California to the grasslands, plums, and roots of the Midwest, perennial foods have been shepherded by Indigenous nations. In the Living Roots collection of essays, you can learn about perennial grains like kernza, the hazelnuts and elderberries grown in the Midwest, and progress to developing a perennial rice in China. 

Carlisle describes other methods of growing food, like permaculture and regenerative and organic farming. She breaks down the theories behind these different methods and how perennials are apart of each of them. Streit Krug discusses how producers are trying to create change through these alternate visions of farming at the local and systemic levels. She asks, “when you see a grassland, do you see land to develop, or do you see food? 

They also discuss the largest food forest in Atlanta, Georgia, and the emotional connections to growing plants, and how their work flows against the tide of industrial agriculture. 

You can learn more about their work at an event tonight at Lake City Books. 

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 hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and U.S. Senator Jon Tester, which led to a decade of research and writing collaborations with farmers in her home state. She has written three books about regenerative and organic farming: Lentil Underground, Grain by Grain, and Healing Grounds, and she is co-editor of the new edited collection Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. Prior to her career as a writer and academic, she spent several years touring rural America as a country singer.

Aubrey Streit Krug is a writer and researcher who investigates relationships among humans, plants, and places. She is the Director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at The Land Institute, where her team leads social and cultural research and educational efforts like civic science that feature learning with communities to help realize more just, diverse, and perennial grain agricultures. Her most recent project, co-edited with Liz Carlisle, is the essay collection Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. Aubrey grew up in rural Kansas, and her curiosity about grassland stories and plants led her to earn a PhD in English and Great Plains Studies. She loves rocky prairie hillsides and lives in Kansas.

Featured image of the cover of Living Roots.

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