We’re debuting our very first branded food product today, and, being PETA, we figured we’d do something that would make a bit of a splash. We’re launching Newkirk Nuggets™ (patent pending), a cutting edge (and surprisingly delicious) animal-meat alternative created by cloning cells from an upper arm biopsy of PETA President Ingrid Newkirk who is “100% free range, grain fed, white meat.” It’ll be a little while before these bad boys appear in grocery stores, but we’re planning to generate some buzz about the new product by handing out free samples outside KFC restaurants here in Virginia, in the hopes that fast-food lovers with a taste for flesh will choose our “100 Percent Human(e) Alternative” instead of chowing down on the tortured remains of chickens inside a KFC. As Ingrid says, “They say everything tastes like chicken, and now so do I.”

The breakthrough has been in the making for 11 years in laboratories spread across three countries, working to grow animal tissue with the taste, texture and, most difficult of all, the “skin depth” or muscle mass of fish and chicken. According to the experts: “The tissue was taken from Ingrid’s upper arm and cultured in a “nutrient soup” of mushrooms, human collagen and soy broth to form myoblasts. The myoblasts reproduce rapidly to form ¾-inch-thick sheets of what PETA calls “100 per cent victimless meat.”

I know, it sounds a wee bit gross at first, but I suspect that anyone who really knows how meat is processed will welcome this safe, humane, and tasty alternative. Check it out:

Check out this fantastic piece by David Shankbone that went up on WikiNews this week. Shankbone interviewed Ingrid about her reaction to the HBO documentary about PETA that just aired. Well worth a read.

Click here to read it.

Every now and then I’m struck by just how much work we get done at PETA. Especially when we have weeks like we had last week: We won the Pom campaign, Smithfield Foods announced that it's phasing out gestation crates for pigs, and CareerBuilder finally stopped its abusive chimpanzee ads.

Much as I'd like to take credit for all this stuff myself, the fact is that none of it would even get off the ground without the vision and the amazing work ethic of PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk. She’s the first one here every morning and the last to leave, and she's always first in line for “extra” activities like bagging straw for cold local dogs or protesting at the local KFC. Right now she’s on a nationwide book tour promoting her latest book, and there was a pretty great news story about that the other night, which you can check out here.

Anyway, my point here is that Ingrid is amazing and inspiring and all things like that. On a completely unrelated note, Ingrid, it feels like a really long time since I last had a raise ...

I just found this speech by PETA President Ingrid Newkirk on YouTube. It's pretty old—an address she gave in Washington a few years ago—but it's cool to see some of the old campaigns PETA was working on back then. Plus, she's a hell of a speaker, so it's worth checking it out, even if you don't have 20 minutes to spare for the whole thing.