Skip to main content
The Morning Star Shop
No comfy blankets for our pigs 
PETER FROST spots some porcine problems in our food supply chain

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.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Savoy Italian cabbage. Photo: Goldlocki/CC
Gardening / 2 January 2026
2 January 2026

MAT COWARD takes a look at some of the options for keen gardeners as we enter 2026

(L to R) Flowering parsnip in its second year; Oven baked parsnip with honey and mustard / Pics (L to R): Pic: Skogkatten/CC Takeaway/CC
Gardening / 6 December 2025
6 December 2025

Commiserations if you failed this year, MAT COWARD offers six points which, if followed religiously, will ensure you succeed next year

(L to R) Wong Boks and a Chinese cabbage and tofu soup  Pics (L to R): Bayartai/CC and NeoBatfreak/CC
Features / 19 July 2025
19 July 2025

MAT COWARD presents a peculiar cabbage that will only do its bodybuilding once the summer dies down

Tree spinach
Features / 12 April 2025
12 April 2025
Well, MAT COWARD did, and here’s his introduction to it