The future of food production?

Hydroponic food-producing greenhouses in cities have been advocated for some time; now this idea is becoming a reality:

The light-bulb moment came for 55-year-old Jerry Fitzpatrick two years ago, while he was surrounded by marijuana.

On a tour of a friend's indoor grow operation (“He said it was just for his own use and for medicinal,” Mr. Fitzpatrick footnoted) the B.C. entrepreneur was stunned by the sight of the plants, which were thriving without any natural sunlight.

Then he began to wonder.

“I said, ‘If you can grow this stuff indoors, I wonder what else you can grow?'”

Mr. Fitzpatrick and his friend, an adept student of hydroponics science, began conducting some edible experiments which, after some time and nourishment, yielded a gold mine of an answer. “Anything that doesn't grow inside the ground, we can probably grow it. We worked with some strawberries and these strawberries turned out to be the best-tasting, juiciest strawberries I've ever eaten in my life,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

“We tried basil. It was like a weed. It was phenomenal. You couldn't keep up with it.”

Source. In some ways, this is a positive development; the obvious advantages include local food production and little or no use of pesticides. On the downside, greenhouses do require a lot of light, which means a lot of electricity. Still, in places where most electricity is produced from renewable sources, this would be a good thing. It also makes food production largely independent of climate.