A big question that comes to mind for a would-be consumer is the process and sterility. How are they going to ensure that the meat is not contaminated – that must require tons of antibiotics and those things are bad, right?  Indeed, approximately 70% of all antibiotics in the United States goes into animals [60].  As it turns out, however, you don’t really need any antibiotics if the process is sterile. In standard cell culture, we obtain a near-sterile environment through the use of culturing cells and tissues in plastic dishes which keeps bacteria or spores in the air from getting in. When we need to replace the medium for the cells, we do so in a biosafety cabinet which controls the environment through air regulation and filtration.  Through this process and other standard cell culture practices, you largely eliminate the possibility of outside contamination. Indeed, virtually all of the cell culture I personally perform is done so free of antibiotics. Thus, contrary to current factory farming practices of overuse of antibiotics, all evidence points to in vitro meat being completely antibiotic free [61, 62, 63].  This means that a switch from factory-farmed meat to in vitro meat will nicely coincide with efforts to reduce antibiotic consumption that has been leading to antibiotic resistance and fear of development of new pathogenic bacterial strains. Additionally, this means that your meat will be free of foodborne pathogens (think Salmonella or Listeria), which would like decrease the incidence of foodborne illnesses or deaths.