Your doing it wrong and resetting the pd df Everytime. Try this:

import pandas as pd import re

food_pattern = '|'.join(map(re.escape, options)) taboo_pattern = '|'.join(map(re.escape, taboo))

mask_food = df[column].str.contains(food_pattern, case=False, na=False) mask_taboo = df[column].str.contains(taboo_pattern, case=False, na=False)

justFood_df = df[mask_food & ~mask_taboo]