If you’ve been to any restaurant or grocery store this week, you’ve probably been confronted with the case of the disappearing tomatoes. Every day it seems more places are pulling their tomatoes “just to be safe.” Though the tomato contamination has been cleared in 17 states, many restaurants and businesses that have stores across the U.S. are still pulling them, even if they are in one of those cleared states. The reason is because they ship from other areas and sometimes boxes get mixed up and mixed in with other boxes and there’s just too much potential for bad things to happen.

Signs confront customers with the fact that tomatoes have been pulled due to an FDA warning. In fact, the FDA is only warning that red plum, red Roma and red round tomatoes could be dangerous. Therefore, some places like Wendy’s are still selling their salads with grape or cherry tomatoes.

But the impact of the tomato contamination can have a longer-term impact on the tomato growers. It is especially frustrating for the growers who have their harvests in the safe states. Some buyers aren’t paying attention to the fact that those “safe” tomato harvests are safe—perhaps because of public fears being generalized to all tomatoes.

The hope for all involved is that the source of the contamination will be resolved soon, so that the problem may be corrected and the rest of us can get back to enjoying all varieties of tomatoes in our meals.

Food and television go hand in hand. Why else would cooking shows be so unbelievably popular? There’s even an entire cable network devoted to food—the Food Network! So it was only a matter of time before cooking came to the reality television genre. As both a fan of food and reality t.v., this was a combination that left me drooling.

My favorite reality television shows include “Iron Chef America” and “Hell’s Kitchen.” “Iron Chef America” airs on Food Network, while “Hell’s Kitchen” airs on FOX.

“Iron Chef America” is a spin-off of the original “Iron Chef”, which first started airing in Japan. The show features top chefs (Mario Batali, Cat Cora, Bobby Flay, and Masaharu Morimoto) battling against lesser-known chefs from the U.S. Each chef has one or two assistants to help them produce a variety of entrees in a one hour time period with an ingredient that isn’t revealed until the start of the show.

“Hell’s Kitchen” stars Chef Gordon Ramsay, a Brit with a major case of potty mouth. Ramsay puts two teams of contestants through their paces, eventually doing full dinner services for actual diners. Ramsay is a perfectionist and has no problems cussing out the team members and shutting down service hours ahead of the scheduled close of the restaurant. In recent seasons, however, we’ve seen a more human side of Ramsay, though it’s usually when dinner service is not in session.

There are other reality food shows but we’ll get to those another day. For now, happy eating!