Are the food labels telling porkies?

The supermarket meat aisle is a minefield for those seeking sausages and bacon from pigs that were once as happy as, well, pigs in muck.

More than 98 per cent of imported pork, bacon or ham is intensively produced. Seventy per cent of British pigmeat comes from animals reared intensively indoors. After that it gets complicated. Which to choose: free-range, outdoor-reared, outdoor-bred or organic?

Consumers pay a 20-25 per cent premium for meat from pigs they believe have roamed in the fresh air from birth to slaughter, but there are no legal standards covering the various descriptions for pork.

Now the RSPCA has written to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Food Standards Agency, the British Pig Executive (BPEX), the British Retail Consortium and leading supermarkets demanding change, claiming that consumers are in danger of being misled.

Julia Wrathall, head of farm animal policy at the RSPCA, said: "We think it is time for a legal definition and as far as we are concerned meat labelled free-range must be from a pig that has spent its whole life outdoors."

Seventy per cent of the 9.15 million pigs reared in Britain live entirely indoors. Five per cent are free-range – born and reared outdoors in fields, with shelter from the rain and sun – and 2 per cent are organic free-range. The rest are outdoor-bred or outdoor-reared. An outdoor-bred pig is born outdoors but spends five-sixths of its life in an open shed, typically about 30m by 20m (100ft by 65ft), with perhaps 299 other piglets. The shed will have low walls made from bales of straw so that the pigs can look out at the sky but not frolic in a field.

An outdoor-reared pig will usually have spent its first three months in the open with its mother before being brought into open sheds for fattening.