Creative Approaches to Food Safety Education

Aside from his more traditional professional endeavors, Dr. Winter is known by his many fans as the Elvis of E. coli and the Sinatra of Salmonella. That’s because he is a pioneering educator and performer who uses musical parodies he writes and records himself to provide food safety information in a creative and fun way. In fact, he is so into writing parodies, he credits himself for creating parodiomics, the innovative concept and the word.

“The major goal of incorporating music and fun into food safety is to improve learning,” Dr. Winter emphasizes. He’s been doing just that for nearly 30 years. Since the early 1990s, from humble beginnings and while continually honing his presentation skills, he has performed at dozens of food safety events throughout the country, including Institute of Food Technologists section meetings.

In July 1998, Dr. Winter recorded his first CD titled “Stayin Alive.” He is showcased on the cover photo wearing a white lab coat and holding an iconic “Saturday Night Fever” pose that would make a polyester shirt-clad John Travolta proud. The following year, he released his second CD, “Sanitized for Your Convenience.” The cover features a graphic of a paper strip like the ones found on toilets in cheap motels, Dr. Winter notes.

What songs are on these wildly popular CDs? If you love the Beatles, you are sure to enjoy Dr. Winter’s version of their iconic “I want to Hold Your Hand,” “You’d Better Wash your Hands.” Fans of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” will appreciate “I Sprayed it on the Grapevine.” With Dr. Winter, Queen’s “We are the Champions”/“We Will Rock You” becomes “They Might Kill You”/“We are the Microbes.” The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Dr. Winter says rap music offers any hip food safety parodiomist a great advantage in reaching younger audiences. “Rap has so many words that you can convey many messages with one song,” he relates, citing his take on Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” “Don’t Get Sicky Wit It,” which addresses Fight Bac!’s major concepts: clean, separate, cook, and chill.

In 2002, Dr. Winter snagged a five-year USDA National Integrated Food Safety Initiative grant for a study about using music to improve food safety curricula. Collaborators included New Mexico State University, Clemson University, the University of Idaho, North Carolina State University, and the University of Delaware. The study yielded three peer-reviewed journal articles.

Empowered by his successes, Dr. Winter offers several take home messages relative to spicing up food safety education.

“Humanize yourself by being yourself and telling your own story to communicate more effectively,” he says. “You don’t have to do music if that’s not your thing. Maybe you write poetry or have an interesting hobby. Consider your unique attributes and interests and how you can incorporate them in your work.”

Be flexible and go with the flow, Dr. Winter adds. “Food safety is serious, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun at the same time,” he relates. “Fun can definitely be used to covey messages and make messages stick.”

Super Active Learning

David Baumler, PhD, recalls when he joined the faculty of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul in 2014 as an assistant professor of molecular food safety microbiology, attendance in the undergraduate introductory microbiology lectures that met at 8:00 a.m. was less than 50 percent, especially during the Friday morning sessions.

Trusty ukulele in hand, Dr. Baumler is proud to report that he was soon able to raise Friday morning attendance to more than 90 percent. He even had students saying they looked forward to coming to class. “Some students who had previously said they dreaded ‘another boring micro class’ actually ended up changing their career paths to a focus on microbiology after completing my course,” Dr. Baumler boasts.