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In the dark of
night, behind the
closed door of a
spare bedroom, Carl
Winter mutates.
By day, he is a food scientist for a major university.
But when dinner is done and the kids
are tucked into
bed, he slips up
the stairs of his
suburban California
house to tinker in
his sanctuary.
For a few late-night hours at the synthesizer, Winter is
no longer simply a toxicologist in a white lab coat.
He's the Elvis of E. coli, the Sinatra of salmonella, or
the artist formerly known as the prince of pesticides.
Winter is a one-man band singing his way into stomachs
around the world.
He tinkers with the lyrics of old pop, rock and disco
hits to produce compact discs with food-safety themes.
His crowd-pleasing parodies are winning fans from
backyard barbecues in California to the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln's Food Processing Center to U.S.
Agriculture Department headquarters in Washington.
At Baltimore's Hard Rock Cafe last year, the crowd held
aloft burning lighters to his "They Might Kill You/We
Are the Microbes," based on Queen's anthem "We Will Rock
You/We Are the Champions." To a stomp-stomp-clap beat,
the song begins:
Buddy, you're a young man, dumb man, careless
And you're gonna make someone quite sick someday
You got spores on your plate
They'll incubate
There's trouble if you cross-contaminate
Microbes they might kill you
Microbes they might kill you.
Trained as a chemist and toxicologist, the 41-year-old
Winter is the FoodSafe program director in the food
science and technology department at the University of
California-Davis. He has a doctorate in agricultural and
environmental chemistry.
In addition to research, his job is to educate and
inform the public about the relative risks posed by
everything from pesticide residues on food to microbial
contamination.
Although the United States is known for having one of
the world's safest food supplies, the national Centers
for Disease Control estimates that 76 million Americans
suffer illnesses from foodborne diseases. These
illnesses lead to more than 5,000 deaths and 325,000
hospitalizations annually.
The National Institutes for health estimates that the
yearly cost of all foodborne diseases in this country is
$5 billion to $6 billion in direct medical expenses and
lost productivity.
Winter - whose singing voice has been called ideal for
silent movies - said his songs are meant to both educate
and entertain.
He sings of irradiation, pesticides, E. coli, olestra,
the Environmental Protection Agency and something as
simple as washing hands, set to the Beatles' "I Want to
Hold Your Hand."
"The important thing is the message, not the quality of
the music," he said. "There's so much competition in the
world today for what I call 'edutainment' that if you
don't have your own gimmick you may have lots of
difficulty in reaching students."
Winter's gimmick is clever lyrics that remain relatively
faithful to the original composition. Here's a piece of
his version of the BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive:"
Well you can tell by the way
I choose my food
I'm a worried guy, in a cautious mood
Food safety scares, they're everywhere
And they're telling me I should beware
There's pesticides, mad Cow Disease
biotech and MSG
Messin' with my sanity
Don't want hepatitis or that gastroenteritis
I'm just stayin' alive, stayin' alive
Scrubbin' off my veggies and I'm
heatin' all my burgers up to one eighty-five, one
eighty-five
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive.
Winter is an unabashed punster who played keyboards and
guitar in college bands at UC-Davis. Altering lyrics to
widely known songs wasn't hard, he said, because many
are "so dreadful to begin with I wasn't hurting the song
to change it to my purposes."
Since producing the "Stayin' Alive" CD in 1998 and
"Sanitized for Your Consumption" in 1999, Winter has
sent 3,500 of his home-produced compact discs to
consumers, teachers and scientists in more than 20
countries.
The Institute of Food Technologists sanctions his
performances as scientific lectures. He's in demand to
appear at professional gatherings from coast to coast.
He has about 25 gigs on his calendar this year,
including an appearance next month before 12,000
scientists in Los Angeles for a convention of the
American Society for Microbiology.
Winter provides access to his CDs at his Web site at
http://foodsafe.ucdavis.edu/music.html. Last week in Sacramento, Calif., Winter sang at a
meeting attended by Floyd Horn, director of the USDA's
Agricultural Research Service. He called Horn up front
to do the "U" in a parody of the Village People's
"YMCA," called "USDA." The chorus:
It's fun to work with the USDA.
It's fun to work with the USDA.
They are everything
An agency can be
They look out for you and me.
Horn said Winter's songs convey important messages with
humor.
"If more people are aware of the dangers of foodborne
illness and how to avoid it - and remembering what was
said to them - then I give him a tremendous amount of
credit," Horn said.
Steve Taylor, a friend of Winter and head of UNL's food
science department, said people may consider Winter's
work frivolous, but the lessons can save lives.
Winter said his music is no substitute for good content
in food-safety programs in schools and restaurants, but
young people with access to the Internet and 100 cable
TV channels can be hooked by music when other strategies
fail.
Teachers tell him they use his songs to warm students up
to the food-safety message.
Winter said his success has made him rethink his
philosophy of teaching. A new classroom approach, he
said, doesn't necessarily have to be good. It simply has
to be different.
"It has to be different enough to capture the kids'
attention," he said, "and then the teacher can reach
into the more traditional toolbox of education."
Meanwhile, Winter jokes that he uses money raised by his
CDs for voice lessons.
"But I haven't lost sight that I need to pay attention
to my day job."
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