Health and safety on competitive cooking television shows

Televised cooking competitions are of wild abundance. Competitors may be tasked with creating a dish from a basket of mystery ingredients. Sometimes they must create their dish after shopping a supermarket-like set. Other times competitors bake intoxicating confections in order to win a top prize. These shows do a great job of engaging and entertaining us. However, sometimes I can't help but notice questionable health and safety choices from judges and contestants alike. 

You open up your mystery basket and must incorporate beer into your dish. This excites you so much that you pop the top off that sucker, raise the bottle wildly in the air, cheers to the judges, and take a sip. As you took a sip, you transferred the germs on your lips to the inside of the bottle. All the alcohol that pours out of the bottle can now pick up these germs. Maybe you wanted to make a beer cheese sauce for your dish (sounds delectable!). Well, now you've added some germs to that sauce. 

There is a second food safety violation that bothers me because it happens frequently. Contestants are simmering a sauce that will serve as the perfect accompaniment to their dish. The judges want to taste. That sounds swell. Do they taste with a utensil? NOPE! They dip their finger into the sauce and take a taste. First of all, doesn't that hurt? Secondly, the germs on your dirty finger just transferred to the contestant's tasty sauce. Next time use a tasting spoon. Thanks.

Let's move to some other questionable oversights. Many contestants cook wearing open-toed shoes. This is a safety concern for a multitude of reasons. What if boiling chicken stock overflows and burns your foot? What if you knock your chef's knife onto your foot? Close toed shoes would prevent these injuries and should be mandatory.

Finally, running around the television set can lead to severe injuries. Contestants run with a large stand mixer. They fall. They run towards the pantry of ingredients and crash into each other. They run with their shopping carts and trip over themselves. Many injuries could be avoided if they simply walked. However, in a timed culinary competition, I do not see these mad dashes ending anytime soon.

Flip to your favorite televised cooking competition and let me know if you notice any of these health and safety concerns. Are there any ones that I haven't mentioned? I will forever love watching these types of shows. However, some choices cause me to furrow my eyebrows a bit.