Los Angeles Times

EAT UP
Patt Morrison
August 25, 1998

Eat up: If the feds heed the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences and appoint a "food safety czar" to halt the rise of food-borne illnesses, here's the obvious choice for the food czar's court composer:

Carl Winter, toxicologist, director of the UC Davis Foodsafe program and "the Elvis of E. coli."

While the chance of microbial life on a wayward rock from Mars gets the headlines, the real and possibly perilous microbial life on berries, burgers, squirrel brains and the whole buffet of human edibles gets much less attention, which worries a bearer of food-safety messages like Winter.

And so, despite the rhyming challenge of words like "gastroenteritis," Winter has put together a not-for-profit CD of public health ditties, parodies of pop songs that rely on his first career as a musician and his second as a lab man. Ladies and gentlemen, just back from a gig at the Institute of Food Technologists in Chicago . . . Carl Winter!

"Stayin' Alive": "Well you can tell by the way I choose my food/I'm a worried guy in a cautious mood. . . Scrubbin' off my veggies and I'm heatin' all my burgers to 185, 185, Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive."

Still, as Winters says, "food may have some hazards, but not eating is always fatal," hence the song "Eat It," to the tune of "Beat It."

Just eat it, eat it
Don't make me repeat it,
There may be microbes, and some residue
But missing out on food's the worst thing you can do...