FoodTechLite

Will Sing for Food (Safety)

Carl Winter just keeps churnin’ out the hits. We first covered this Extension Food Toxicologist (Director of the FoodSafe Program at University of California, Davis) in the fourth issue of FoodTechSource Forum (March/April, 1999). At that time, Winter, who has a unique talent for writing pop song parodies with a food safety slant, had released his first self-recorded (and self-promoted) CD, “Stayin’ Alive.” Well, Dr. Winter is back at it again with an album full of material that’s wackier than ever.

Winters’ new offering, “Sanitized for your Consumption,” is a hefty helping of ten well-crafted numbers. Among the most memorable are “Don’t Be a Gambler” (a food-safety rendition of Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler”), “Food Irradiation” (a take-off on “The Locomotion”, made famous by Little Eva), “I Sprayed it on the Grapevine” (modeled after Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”) and “Beware La Vaca Loca” (a parody of the Ricky Martin hit “Livin’ La Vida Loca”).

Despite the home-recorded quality of the material, each song is fresh and genuinely entertaining. Take, for example, the witty “They Might Kill You/We are the Microbes”, a take-off on Queen’s “We Will Rock You/We are the Champions”:

Buddy you’re a young man, dumb man, careless
And you’re gonna make someone quite sick someday
You’ve 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

ETC.

For further examples of Dr. Winter’s musical talent—including several videotaped live-performance numbers from dinner shows he’s done at food industry seminars, log on to http://foodsafe.ucdavis.edu/music.html.