A growing trend in the food business is called the locavore movement. That means people who care about what they eat often prefer to eat food that was grown locally.

The reasons for such a preference are many. They range from the concern for how much energy is expended shipping food over many hundreds of miles to the feeling that keeping their grocery dollars close to home helps family farming operations stay in business rather than sell out to agribusiness conglomerates that put profits ahead of both people and the environment.

But sometimes the best reason to eat local is that the food grown nearby isn’t just closer, it’s really better.

That is, apparently, the case with New York eggs.

As the federal government has leaned on the owners of two giant egg-producing operations in Iowa to recall more than half a billion salmonella-tainted eggs, grocers in West-ern New York can in good conscience reassure their customers that the eggs on their shelves not only come from just down the road, but from a state where egg producers follow some common-sense rules that justify at least some consumer confidence.

The primary supplier of eggs to the Buffalo area’s two major supermarket chains—Wegmans and Tops—is a West-ern New York outfit called Kreher’s Farms. That organization has, at any one time, 1.4 million chickens on three farms that stretch from Clarence, in Erie County, to the Town of Wolcott, between Rochester and Syracuse.

That’s a lot of chickens. And a lot of potential, thankfully not realized here, for the same build-up of filth, rodents and carelessness that apparently riddled the Wright County Egg operation and Hillandale Farms that are said to be the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened at least 1,500 people.

Avoiding such hazards isn’t just luck. It takes planning and work. And in New York, the work follows the standards set by the New York State Egg Quality Assurance Program. That’s a set of rules written by state officials and egg farmers in response to a 1990s salmonella outbreak around here, rules that deal with keeping chickens healthy, barn and cages clean, eggs refrigerated, etc.

The standards are voluntary and, even if followed, are not a total assurance that every egg out of every chicken will be safe to eat. But the fact that New York growers such as Kreher’s Farms have embraced the standards, even raised them in many cases, goes a long way not only to reassure consumers, but also to earn New York’s own farmers a larger share of the market.

One of these days, perhaps, the food business everywhere will be dominated by people who see that state-of-the-art safety standards are not just an expense, they are the best way of making your eggs, beef, pork, lettuce or asparagus stand out in the supermarket, or the national market, as what’s for dinner.