Welcome to Food with Mark Bitman. I'm Kate Bitman. Thanks for being here. We know how many of you are loyal listeners and we appreciate that so much. If you'd like to hear more from Mark and me and our small but mighty team, check us out on bitmanproject.com. When you subscribe there, you'll get access to our recipe database, which now has thousands of recipes, with more added weekly.

If you prefer a substack experience, we're on there, too, bitmanproject.substack.com.

Reach out to us with any questions, comments, or stuff you think should be featured on the podcast or on our site, food at markbitman.com. The birds have almost been making me nuts lately with their singing.

I live on the 14th floor of an apartment building, and we still hear birdsong much of the time during the spring.

They seem very happy right now. So it's a

perfect time to have today's three guests on. Liz Carlisle, who is an associate professor

in the Environmental Studies program at UC Santa Barbara, joined Mark on the podcast back in 2022, along with farmers Mai Noyan and

Latrice Tatsy. Today, we're bringing Liz back. Her new book is Living Roots, The Promise of Perennial

Foods, which she edited with Aubrey Strite Krug, the director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at the Land Institute.

Joining the two of them is Leah Peniman, who is an acclaimed activist and farmer. She co-founded

Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, is the author of Farming While Black, and she contributed an essay in Living

Roots. She and Mark have known each other for a good amount of time, and I was thrilled

to meet her. The topic of perennials and how they can help us and our environment was a

completely foreign topic to me, and I'm really glad I learned about it. It's a hopeful topic and a

hopeful conversation and a great one for this, the last week of April and the lead up to May.

The book, which is called Living Roots, is written around the premise that perennial foods

should be seriously considered as part of the solution to the climate crisis to building a more resilient food system, as we all know and other people and have thought about, but maybe other people have not considered most of agriculture is based on annuals.

That is, you plant something,

you grow it, you rip it out of the ground, or cut it down, and then you do the same thing.

The following year, perennials are things that grow and grow and grow year after year after year.

But there's more to it than that. So let's just say what makes something perennial. And what are some

examples of perennials? Yeah. Thanks, Mark. I'll jump in on this one. So perennial foods are

...