It's been coming under increasing fire for its role in climate change – researchers estimate that farms are responsible for 13% of total global emissions (the number is higher when you factor in transportation and industrial processing) – and its toll on finite resources. But human beings need to eat and with the earth's population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, how are farmers supposed to feed the world without running the planet into the ground?

The solution to this issue might not lie on the farm but in the lab. Imagine being able to grow your food from cells – there wouldn't be any waste, pollution or food-safety issues and you'd be able to get all the nutrients you need.

You might recall attempts to grow meat in a lab. Well, meet the vegetarian answer to this development: the CellPod, a home appliance that lets users grow food from cell cultures. Finnish researcher Lauri Reuter of research firm VTT says inspiration for the device came from "the need to develop new ways of producing food" due to urbanization and agriculture's impact on the environment. It is not meant to replace agriculture but to offer consumers "a new and exciting way of producing local food in their own homes."