One other reason to buy local food: You can feel really smug when the rest of America is in freak-out mode after nearly half a billion supermarket eggs have been recalled. (Worse than the salmonella was the thought that eggs sold in May might still be in refrigerators — and I thought I was bad at GE pruning.) Nearly 20 years ago I sold an op-ed to the hometown paper on another reason to eat local food: You don’t have to worry about shit in it. Nothing is new today except the scale of the disaster, the fact that one producer can flood the market with literal filth. But my bigger beef is with the hollering machines (formerly known as print megaphones). Just as with the oil gusher and the mine explosion and every other regulatory breakdown, now we’re getting no end of stories breathlessly reporting that “the company had a long history of regulatory issues.” Whatever happened to preventive journalism, to exposing the bad guys before they have poisoned more than a thousand people? Once the manure is out, it’s a little late to be exposing the holes in the barn door.