An Urban's Rural View

Farmers who blog and tweet and post on Facebook in this age of "agvocacy" should check out the work of Carl Winter. The University of California at Davis toxicologist uses music to tell food-safety stories, turning popular classics like "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" into "I Sprayed It On the Grapevine" and "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" into "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters."

Winter performs live in classrooms, virtually at his website (http://foodsafe.ucdavis.edu/…) or on YouTube and commercially in the CDs he sells.

Last year the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology recognized Winter's contributions with its Borlaug CAST Communication Award. Last week he appeared at a CAST session in Washington where he outlined his positions on food-safety issues and performed.

Accompanying himself on a synthesizer, he covered the Beatles with "You Better Wash Your Hands" and Billy Joel with "Still Seems Like Food to Me." He set up to do "Don't Get Sicky Wit It" after a Will Smith rap number, but his synthesizer refused to cooperate.

As his titles hint, Winter worries a lot about food poisoning, which he says afflicts 48 million Americans a year, e coli and the like. He doesn't fret about pesticide residue on food, which he considers very low risk. His website has three songs on genetic engineering with somewhat different messages, but the one that represents his views best is "Still Seems Like Food to Me."

For some of his numbers, Winter combines music with animations. Among the cute ones on his website are "Stomachache Tonight" (the Eagles), "Don't Be a Gambler" (Kenny Rogers) and "We Are the Microbes" (Queen). The lyrics to the latter begin:

"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."

It isn't every advocate of agriculture who can sing and play the keyboards, but Winter's tale challenges those who are trying to tell ag's story to use whatever talents they have as creatively as they can. It's a reminder that there's more to advocacy than blogging and tweeting.

I got a reminder of the need to tell ag's story the other night when a usually well-informed friend in Washington said, "Isn't it terrible that Monsanto and other agribusinesses own most of the farms in the country these days?"

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