Slow Food North Yorkshire has organised a screening of the pork industry documentary Pig Business at City Screen, York, on Tuesday evening.

Filmmaker Tracy Worcester, the Marchioness of Worcester, will attend the 8.30pm show for a question-and-answer session and to discuss how the (lack of) labelling laws means that British farmers are being undercut by cheap imports from Europe.

“Yorkshire being a main pig-breeding centre in the UK, this should be an important film for our local communities,” says Dave Taylor, City Screen marketing manager.

Pig Business charts the rise of the factory farm in the USA and the spread of this industrial model into Europe.

As Tracy Worcester follows the path from giant pig factories in Poland to sausages arriving on British supermarket shelves, we meet migrant workers and the small farmers they replace, find communities overshadowed by giant farms and hear from those affected by air and water pollution.

Experts such as Robert Kennedy Junior expose the controversial practices of the multinational meat corporations, from the environmental impact to the destruction of rural livelihoods at home and abroad.

As the hidden consequences of factory farming become apparent, the film asks: Does it have to be like this?

The answer, Pig Business posits, is that all is not lost. Consumers have a choice, either to support an unsustainable industry or to buy high-welfare meat that does not cost the earth.

The film has met with the approval of chef and culinary campaigner Jamie Oliver. “I never realised the appalling extent to which pigs – intelligent animals – were treated in certain parts of the world,” he says. “Pig Business is an extremely important documentary; it really hammers home the darker side of the global pig-farming industry.’’ Tuesday’s screening forms part of Slow Food’s 30 Days Of Food programme, which coincides with the launch of Pig Business’s No Porkies Just Honest Labelling campaign.