Declaring lexicals within $sth-bind_columns()

Lately I have taken on the maintainance of a legacy Perl 5 script. The script heavily uses the DBI function bind_columns() for retrieving data from a relational database. After some refaktoring I ended up with something like this:

my $sth = $dbh->prepare(<<'END_SQL');
SELECT color, food, num_legs
    FROM pet
END_SQL
my ( $food, $something_else, $color, $num_legs);
$sth->bind_columns( \$color, \$food, $num_legs );