I DROVE up to Suffolk few weeks ago. I love that most easterly county for all sorts of reasons but when I get there my usual first delight is the sight of fields full of free-range pigs.

Pigs are gentle creatures with surprising intelligence. Studies have found they’re cleverer than dogs and even children as old as three years. 

In each fenced-off field division is a small corrugated hut — they call them arcs — a water trough, another for food and a large sow mother pig surrounded by her family of piglets. In a sunny summer they can get sunburnt.

Selective breeding continues to raise the number of baby pigs one sow can produce from a single mating. 

Many years ago the normal litter would be half a dozen, today it is often a full dozen and as many as 14 or even 15 is not unknown. 

Each female can produce between two and three litters every year. Pigs will average ages of 10 or so years unless they are slaughtered earlier.

Most of our commercially produced pigs are crossbreeds, often a cross of large whites and British landrace — particularly good for bacon. 

My local — and rather good — butcher sells me pork, sausages and bacon from Berkshire blacks or Gloucester old spots. 

These and others like Tamworth and saddlebacks are bred for flavour rather than high conversion rates that produce maximum meat from food in the minimum time. 

Today, even in Suffolk, most pigs are still raised indoors. Nationally the figure for indoor intensive pig-keeping is probably 85 per cent. 

Indoor pigs are kept warm and dry but never see the sun or sky and never get a chance to root about in mud and grass. These are never happy as a pig in shit.

For the six months, or slightly less, the baby pigs will live before slaughter they will be fed a carefully regulated diet that is designed to get them to grow to their designed target weight and size at slaughter.

Often one or two babies of a big litter will fail to thrive. These “runts,” as they are called, will be culled to avoid wasting any food on them. Occasionally they may be sold as that luxury product, the suckling pig. 

Those pigs that do get down to the job of putting on meat will be carefully weighed and measured. Once they reach the target weight it will be off to the slaughterhouse.

…Well, that’s how it used to be. Now there are far too many pigs and not enough slaughtermen or slaughterwomen to do the skilled job of killing and butchering the animals.

Subtly over the last few years we have even dropped that word slaughter. We have replaced slaughterhouse with the gentler, much more acceptable French word abattoir. It sounds much less cruel, doesn’t it?

Whether working in a slaughterhouse or abattoir many of those skilled butchers were from Poland or other parts of eastern Europe. After Brexit they lost the right to live and work here. 

The skilled British workers that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Cabinet of Tory buffoons promised would come rushing forward to take what would overnight become well-paid jobs — like so many of PM Johnson’s promises — simply never materialised.

As the crisis of no slaughterers or butchers worsened Johnson came up with another hare-brained scheme. This time to issue special temporary work permits for skilled workers. 

The special permits were for just six months and would end just days after Christmas. Not hard to realise why very few Polish people took up Johnson’s kind offer. Covid restrictions on travel haven’t helped, of course.

It is actually not hard to realise why Polish butchers were so good at cutting pork. Meat from pigs is by far the most popular meat in Poland and the national cuisine has many famous and delicious pig-based dishes. Most are much harder to spell or pronounce than to cook.

One such is Pieczen wieprzowa z winem, the traditional Polish pork roast soaked in a wine-based richly spiced marinade and roasted in the oven with chopped vegetables and broth. It is served with potatoes or potato dumplings and sauerkraut on the side.

Zeberka wedzone are Polish-style smoked and spiced pork ribs. The marinated ribs can be either cold-smoked or hot-smoked and eaten warm or chilled.

Kotlet mielony is the Polish version of popular breaded meat patties or cutlets. They consist of ground pork, soaked stale bread, eggs, and a variety of spices and fresh herbs. 

Usually shaped into flattened round or oval shapes, the patties are pan-fried until they are brown and crispy on the outside. They are traditionally served alongside boiled or mashed potatoes and fresh or pickled salads.

Kotlet Schabowy is another popular Polish dish. It is the Polish variation of the more famous German breaded pork cutlet known as schnitzel. 

It is typically prepared with a thin breaded pork chop fried in lard, and served with cooked potatoes, sauerkraut and various fresh and pickled salads. 

Last but by no means least is golonka, pork hock or pork knuckle. The skin side is seared for crackling and the joint roasted really slowly until tender. 

Back home in Poland the native butchers prepare thousands of these almost identical pork joints for Sunday lunches or holidays, festivals and any other celebration feasts.

You can find recipes and often video instructions for all these Polish pork dishes and few dozen others on the internet. However if you prefer your Polish delicacy ready-made just check out your local Polish deli or even the Polish section of your favourite supermarket — they will have all kinds of ready-to-eat sliced smoked sausages, hams and other pork specialities.

Today’s intensive pig farming uses a carefully blended and measured feeding regimes to ensure that animals grow to the sizes, shapes and weights that the supermarket or chain butcher’s buyers require.           

That target weight and size will be exactly what the supermarket or meat processors have specified. No room here for good old Mother Nature to intervene. 

The skill of the farmers and then the butchers is to get the bacon slices exactly the right size and shape for the packets and the many other cut joints, ribs and other bits to be as identical as peas in a pod.

It’s a far cry from my youth when every school dinner kitchen or works canteen would have a brightly coloured dustbin marked “Pig Swill.” Many households, too, would have such a bin into which would go every scrap of vegetable peelings and other food waste.

It would all be collected in special lorries and taken to farms who would boil it up to make food for the pigs. This was sustainable food recycling at its very best. 

Today the pigs get carefully laboratory-mixed food in exactly the quantities to make them grow at the designed pace.    

If we let that go awry, as we have recently, you end up with oversize and overweight pigs being culled and rendered down for lard and other industrial cooking fats or even dried protein flakes for industrial and agricultural use. Yet more of these oversize carcasses are simply burnt or buried — what a waste.

Modern agriculture is making a terrible mess of itself — aided by the huge subsidies awarded to rich landowners by the other rich bastards who inhabit the Tory benches in the Commons and the Lords. 

I do hope the cocaine apparently available in all the Palace of Westminster lavatories carried the Red Tractor badge. 

With all this happening in the countryside perhaps it is no wonder that more and more people are turning vegetarian or even becoming completely vegan.

It is certainly true that most of us eat too much meat and not enough vegetables for the good of our health. However leaving pigs to be killed burnt or buried on our farms is certainly not the best way to move towards a healthier way of eating.

Try to eat as healthy a diet as you can — but whatever you do don’t make a pig of yourselves.