Both are correct. First sounds better and is more common. Second can be used to emphasize that you are looking for multiple ways, but the first does not preclude multiple ways. Is there any way to solve this issue? Yes, there are many.
A third formation is
Is there no way to solve this issue?
A question with the expectation that in fact, there is a way.
As snailplane and Man_From_India tell you, your question does not involve adjectives, which never have a distinct plural form, but attributive nouns.
The singular form is certainly the ‘default’ for attributive constructions, but plural attributives are not uncommon. Some of these (and probably most of the older ones) come about because the singular and plural forms have different meanings. For instance
- We take an ‘arts degree’ or a ‘humanities degree’ because the singular would imply something different: an ‘art degree’ is a degree in painting or sculpture or something of the sort rather than a degree from the School or Faculty of Arts, and a ‘humanity degree’, would be a degree from the Department of Humanity, if such a thing existed.
- We speak of the ‘civil rights movement’ because ‘civil rights’, plural, is a term with a specific meaning, the entire body of rights supposed to be held by all members of a civil society rather than a specific civil right or a general desire for ‘rightness’ in civil society.
In other cases, the plural seems to have come about as a sort of compromise where the underlying sense might represent a simple plural or a singular possessive or a plural possessive—see, for instance, this blogpost on the correct spelling of Veterans Day. (But this is by no means a rule; see this Google Ngram on various names for the laws under which US workers are compensated for on-the-job injuries.)
In yet other cases, grammatical concord seems to be in play. We speak of Virginia Woolf as a woman writer, but we are more likely to call Woolf and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor women writers than woman writers. Geoffrey Leech, in Change in Contemporary English, Cambridge, 2009 (220) suggests that this is more likely when the plural is irregular, without an -s.
But none of this explains why plural attributives became much more common in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in British English. Leech suggests that:
The increase of plural attributive nouns may well have been brought on by the general increase in noun sequences, bearing in mind that the implicit link between two adjacent nouns has to be inferred, putting a burden on the cognitive processing abilities of the reader. In such circumstances an -s at the end of a word may be a handy clue to interpretation. Thus the generic meaning of the plural in weapons purchases or fisheries protection is helpful in eliminating the possibility of a singular interpretation (that one weapon is to be purchased, or that one fishery is to be protected) and in capturing the intended generic meaning of the whole (220-221).
Leech says that Stig Johannson, Plural attributive nouns in present day English, Univ. Lund, 1980, identifies more factors, but this does not appear to be available free online.
Best Answer
This sentence has three important factors to consider: it is an existential construction, the displaced subject of the sentence is a noun phrase coordination, and the coordination is a list (more than two items).
In this particular case, is would be the safest choice (i.e., least likely to run afoul of any rules), although The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language suggests that are would also be acceptable, due to it being a list.
TL;DR:
CGEL says either is or are is acceptable for your sentence.
Collins COBUILD states explicitly that is should be used.
From the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002):
Typically the subject and verb should agree (pg 499).
There are however "semantically motivated overrides." One such override is when the subject is a coordination ("two or more elements of syntactically equal status... linked by means of a coordinator such as and or or"):
Ch 5, §18.4(a) Coordination with and
There are times though when "the subject is conceptualized as a single unit and this determines the singular verb." One of the examples given is, "Eggs and bacon is my favorite breakfast." In that particular example, "my favorite breakfast can only apply to eggs and bacon as a unit and hence the plural verb is impossible." (see also Ch15 §1.3.2 "Joint coordination", which discusses distributive vs. joint coordination in more depth)
The closest noun is however taken into account sometimes when using or (Ch 5 §18.4(b)) and always taken into account with a negative (Ch5 §18.4(d) and (e)).
The example you've given in the question though, is an existential construction (there is a "dummy pronoun" for the "displaced subject": rice, meat and tomatoes). (pg 241, Ch 4 §3.2.2)
Usually the verb should agree with the displaced subject (see footnote 71 on page 500):
However, when the displaced subject is a coordination, there is an exception (footnote 21 on page 242). When the coordination consists of only two items (binary coordination) then it is idiomatic for the verb to agree with the first item in the list:
A plural example is given on page 1393 [7i]:
The exception to the exception is when the coordination consists of a list (three or more items, aka multiple coordination). The last caveat in footnote 21 states that in such a case,
Araucaria found an example on page 1400 demonstrating that a singular verb is also valid with lists (the use of "readily" in the footnote 21 is ambiguous about which is more common or preferred), [29i]:
So, with three items in your displaced subject (rice, meat and tomatoes), you can really choose either is or are (according to CGEL).
If there were only two items in the coordination, then it would be less ambiguous; a singular verb would be preferred/idiomatic. Also, note that a plural verb would not necessarily be ungrammatical, indicated by an asterisk, but merely questionable/unidiomatic, indicated by a question mark (see page xii for those notational conventions).
More information can also be found in Chapter 16 "Information packaging", section 6 "Existential and presentational clauses" on page 1390.
Collins COBUILD English Grammar states that with lists the verb should agree with the first item in the list.